“I’m an artist. When you tell people that they usually say, what’s your medium? I always say, ‘Extra large.’”

-Jean Michel Basquiat

Nobody as far as I know has written about the cultural significance of walls and too bad, for though their subject may be pedestrian at first glance, their prominence within history and art is undeniable. Jerusalem has a Wailing Wall where wishes are wedged into the stone by faithful worshippers. Israel has another wall built recently, used as a border to filter Palestinian people through security checkpoints in and out of Gaza and the West Bank. Berlin once had a wall utilized for similar reasons and Pink Floyd has a depressing album about one. China’s wall you can see from the moon and Jean-Paul Sartre’s most readable short story is called The Wall.

Walls have been with us ever since man has sought shelter from his environment. They have various necessary and symbolic functions, the most obvious of which is providing structural support for homes and business. While accommodating privacy they also separate us, shutting people away from each other. Walls are boundaries; they suggest limits, establishing private property, telling us where we can and cannot go. They can be white, padded, and locked if one is deemed insane. Should they be covered with squiggly marks done in aerosol paint, they jeopardize real estate values. Walls are intended to protect us yet too often in these terrified times they are adorned with barbed wire, their symbolism taking a ghastly, violent poise. We forget this, but walls are also potential canvases. Huge, inspiring, storytelling space.

While the kingdom of Morocco may be famous for its deserts, bazaars, and couscous, it may be the vividness of color that strikes the visitor on a level that might be described as ecstatic. Psychologists have long pointed out the connection between mood and color and that melancholy can be a consequence of grayness. Throughout the large cities and small towns of Morocco, windows, gates, and doors are gilded with reds, pinks, and orange. Although it can feel slapdash and improvised, if not whimsical, the effect of urban color on the spirit is deliberate and powerful.

Asilah, a small Atlantic seaside town just south of Tangier, annually commissions international artists to create large, painted murals. Some are representational while others are abstract: visible are elements of cave paintings, cubism, and Cy Twombly. Like most inner-city medinas in Morocco, Asilah’s central layout is a complex maze of plazas, streets, and alleys that takes some time to orient oneself. Throughout the medina these huge murals can be found, though the best ones are located by the main elementary school, which hopefully, is an inspiration to the passing children.

This is a wonderful thing. To keep art in museums– as opposed to the streets– is to suggest that art is ‘historical’, and thus has little relevance to contemporary culture. Worse, secluding its appreciation to privileged circles within the museum complex, society withholds art’s everyday effect from the ordinary citizen. To do this in Morocco, a country with double-digit unemployment, would be spiteful and absurd. The streets of Moroccan towns are never silent. In cafes men smoke and talk. Women converge to gossip on doorways and park benches. Home for many is a cramped dark place, so it makes sense the street would be a viable contrast in brightness.

Chefchaouen is another city remarkable for its color. Most of the town center has been painted a rich knockout blue since the 15th century. This bold use of a uniform color has a tremendous effect. It gives the city a visible personality. Moreover, it welcomes the visitor into its space effortlessly, so that old men in djellaba cloaks, children playing with water guns, cats lazy from the sun and you, yourself, have all become characters within this rich and beautiful canvas.

If one walks long enough (and in such surroundings one is inclined to walk all day), a person will eventually witness cracks in the walls, exposed brick and wood, childishly scrawled graffiti. Rather than imperfections, these marks seem to define character and age: not all dilapidation is bad, just as not all shiny surfaces are beautiful. In fact, the flaws insinuate the aura of collaboration between time, nature and human creativity as on evidence is the work of the stonemason, the carpenter, the journeyman laborer, and the eleven-year-old boy.

As the world moves closer in globalized sameness it becomes imperative that we adopt the flair for color so appreciable within the towns of Asilah and Chefchaouen. Doing so would bring people out of their techno-cocoons and into the street for games, talk, and friendship. There is no excuse. After all, we have plenty of wall space to fill.

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Text & Photography © Alan Dejecacion / Magnesium

For centuries the Mekong river and its tributaries have been the lifeline to the southeast Asian nation of Laos with its life-sustaining role as trade and communication route. Carving a 900 kilometer border between Laos and northeast Thailand, the Mekong continues to be the main highway for many where paved roads are virtually non-existent. Cut off from major markets by a lack of reliable surface transport (the Mekong is not all that navigable year-round), the provinces and nearby villages along the river banks have developed a small, fragile and largely insular economy of local production and services resting on a foundation of traditional subsistence.

The Mekong swells during the monsoon, bringing silt deposit and nutrients, thus allowing the area to thrive via rich soil for agriculture and great numbers of fish. The richest soils of the country are on the river banks and inland as far as the river silt is carried. For landlocked Laos, the Mekong and its tributaries are the all-important source of fish. In mountain streams, in rivers small and large, in flooded rice fields, people cast their nets and set their traps.

China’s ravenous appetite for hydroelectric power at home and its thrust southward into southeast Asia in search of trade is changing the very character of the river. This is true not only in China itself, but also for the livelihoods of people living downstream in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

This complex ecosystem, and the livelihoods of millions who depend on it, is threatened by China’s plans to build eight large dams on the upper reaches of Mekong in Yunnan Province. The plan will drastically alter the river’s natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment. Despite these serious potential impacts, construction of the upper Mekong dams has proceeded without any real assessment of the likely impacts to the river and its people.

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Thessaloniki: this is where I was born. This is my hometown, a place loaded with memories which feed from nostalgia of all things passed.

Something inside makes me reluctant to talk about this city, as if I am afraid to ruin a deeper bond by using inadequate, crippled words. And so I walk around taking photographs of its surfaces as if throwing beacons, points to recognise my moments in time.

I saw the city ruined and changed, literally building itself anew on the ruins of its history. I remember the icy winds of winter nights, the dead empty streets of summer, the smell of the sea mixed with gasoline, all the houses my family moved. I saw the light disappearing from the streets as the buildings rose in height, the rivers of cars emerging, radios playing foreign stations on rainy days, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the policeman ringing our doorbell asking why we didn’t hang the Greek flag on national holidays. Everyday things always in the early afternoon light, neighbourhood movie theaters with two features daily, music everywhere in the streets, strange music, brought by immigrants to this Balkan junction. A city with the ruins of three religions, staircases full of the smells of homemade cooking. So many first times, all the first times, my departures, my homecomings and then the night, terrifying at first only to become the only real thing, the essential fascination bare of everything unimportant.

But then again, this memory carpet often dwells on cliches, so let’s forget about them. I am still around, after all, and the city is changing once more. When I walk alone on its streets, trying to be a foreigner and a native at the same time before I press the shutter, I often wonder what the future memories for the new generations will be. The city persistently remains a colossal museum of accidents as every big city by definition is, and I think of what Walter Benjamin said “Not to find one’s way in a city doesn’t mean a thing actually. To lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling”.

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Only a few man-made structures lend themselves to automatic inclusion in science-fiction movies. Locations so out-of-this-world they have to be used as phantasmagoric shooting locations. San Diego’s Geisel Library, half the Statue of Liberty, the Bradbury Building…

On the Northern outskirts of Tokyo, the list also includes a drain. Also known by the fabricated name “G-Cans” (not an abbreviation of anything in particular), the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel however is no ordinary drain, but a series of enormous, interconnected, underground facilities. Massive holding tanks, surge suppressors, huge pump rooms, networked tunnels, control rooms, inlets, outlets, overflows, and more – all fifty meters underground.

With one hundred kilometers of flood control tunnels, the overall project was started in 1992, with the G-Cans section finishing in 2009. Designed to provide flood control for the northern reaches of the greater Tokyo metropolis, the G-Cans element alone is massive on an unimaginable scale.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F100 35mm and XP2 Super.

The two billion dollar G-Cans project is nearly six and a half kilometers long, with an interconnecting series of holding silos, varying in size up to sixty-five meters tall and over thirty meters in diameter. The largest holding tank is the massive “cathedral” – one hundred seventy-seven meters long and seventy-seven meters wide. Its roof is supported by sixty massive pillars, designed to provide both strength and low resistance to the swirling waters.

The basic design function of G-Cans is to re-channel potential flood waters from one watercourse to another, balancing and regulating the water flow to ensure flood surges and river breaches are kept to a minimum. As well as natural water flows, a turbine hall, equipped with ten megaWatt of Pratt & Whitney pumping capacity, can move over two hundred thousand liters of water per second into the adjacent Edo River. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just over one second.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium.

Construction of the main tunnels utilized a conventional Tunnel Boring Machine (“TBM”) and a two-layer lined tunnel – supporting framework and internal smooth sleeves for water flow. Ground water freezing was undertaken with large-scale expander insertions into the surrounding rock, with condensate forming on their many coupling heads, the now-removed expanders resembled alien spawning stations.

Standing meters below the previous high-water mark, with the sound of compressors and dripping water in the distance, is a remarkably surreal experience. The damp languid air adds to the feeling of potentially being swallowed up by a flooding wave as it careens through the tunnels, sweeping everything to its doom along the way. Fifty meters below the surface, fifty meters below the suburbs, with the kids playing soccer on the fields of Saitama above our heads, riding bicycles through the tunnels as we explored really added to the off-world feeling.

Since completion, the tunnels, side chambers, and main “cathedral” hall have been used in making a Tetsujin 28 film, a Range Rover commercial, numerous other TV spots, and some of the photographs here were used in the source rendering for a computer game.

While the main tunnels are now off-limits for access, the control room, above-ground infrastructure, and main cathedral are sometimes available for tours during the non-typhoon season. Bookings are available for Japanese speakers via their main website.

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To me, the name Burma always conjured up images from George Orwell’s Burmese Days or Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay. While in the 1920s, Orwell spent five years as a police officer in Burma when it was still part of the British Empire, Kipling never actually made it to Mandalay. Though I had no desire to spend five years in South East Asia’s poorest and most corrupt nation, I sure was determined to make it to Mandalay.

First stop: Yangon, the former capital. As soon as I left the airport, I knew Burma would be very different from what I had experienced in Viet Nam, Laos or Cambodia. Outside, the taxi drivers were eager to get me into their battered and beaten up taxis, happily showing off their betelnut stained smiles and wearing longyi, a traditional Burmese long skirt-like garment, similar to a sarong. One of the first things I noticed, besides the many and very large potholes in the road, was the lack of motorbikes. As it turns out the military junta had prohibited them, together with trishaws and bicycles, some twenty years ago.

The city itself wasn’t unlike many of the Asian towns and cities I had visited already. Bustling with activity, smoggy, humid and stifling hot. When the government supply of electricity gets cut off, which happens frequently and seemingly totally random, the private shop generators start up, almost in unison. The sound is deafening. At night at around 9 o’clock, the restaurants close, the lights go out and the city turns almost black and very quiet.

After a few days Yangon, I gathered the courage to take the overnight bus to Mandalay, a thirteen hour ride through the middle of nowhere and a pretty dangerous one. There are no street lights, the roads are in bad condition and a lot of vehicles, not surprisingly, drive without lights. As a matter of fact, the only well-lit places along the way appeared to be the well-guarded prisons. After a long and bumpy ride I found myself at a dusty parking lot at five AM where I quickly hopped into the back of an old Mazda pick-up.

Like Yangon, I noticed that Mandalay also had its fair share of broken up dusty roads, but none of the charming yet crumbling colonial architecture of Burma’s former capital. Though the view from Mandalay Hill definitely made up for the city’s general lack of character. Despite the presence of motorbikes and bicycles- which are still allowed in Mandalay- the city felt more like a small town. I ended up spending two days with Mr. Htoo, a trishaw driver, who energetically pedaled me all over town. I visited temple after temple, which were undeniably beautiful, but what I enjoyed most was our conversations at the teashops. While sitting on tiny little plastic stools, sipping tea and eating deep-fried Indian snacks, we talked about his family, life in Burma, his hopes and dreams as well as his losses.

Those losses are obvious, after having been colonised by the British for many years, occupied by the Japanese during WWII, the Union of Burma gained independence in 1948 and never had the chance to rebuild and stabilise itself as a democracy when in 1962 General Ne Win led a military coup d’etat. The Burmese have lived under this military junta ever since, and have been denied basic human rights. Human trafficking, child labour as well as forced labour are rampant. There is no freedom of speech and an estimated thirty to fifty percent of the Burmese live below the poverty line of roughly a dollar a day as a direct result of the ruling military junta.

As for hopes and dreams, general elections are scheduled to take place this year, though an exact date has still not been confirmed. Burma last held an election in 1990, when the National League for Democracy’s Aung San Suu Kyi was set to become prime minister. However, the ruling generals led by Than Shwe dismissed the results and have remained in power ever since.

Aung San Suu Kyi has spent fourteen of the last twenty years under house arrest and it’s highly unlikely she will be allowed to play a role in the upcoming elections. Though currently still under house arrest at her home in Yangon, she remains the symbol of hope for those who oppose the junta.

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Along with two other photographers, I am sitting in a rented car. As we sit parked on a sparsely lit dock in the south of Japan, we are watching the sun rise. Even before our arrival it feels like a unique journey; short-hop commuter flights, business hotels, a rented Honda rep-mobile, plotted routes on topographical maps, ramen dinners and konbini breakfasts.

It is 04:30, and after having driven through the early hours from Nagasaki to a remote fishing village in search of our boatman, we are ready to embark on the final leg to our ultimate destination – Hashima. An abandoned island-city, Hashima remains untouched in the nearly forty years since its 5000 or so occupants vacated by boat, taking with them only a few scant possessions.

With mining operations established in 1810, on an island less than 500 metres long, Hashima’s well known legacy includes it once being the most densely populated place on earth, housing what was Japan’s tallest building, and its first large-scale reinforced concrete apartment block. The erroneous claim of this island city being shelled by the US Navy in World War Two, ‘as it looked like a battleship’, contributes to the legend of Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, evident in the popular local nickname for Hashima.

Coming across a few fishermen, who are enjoying their last cigarette before returning home, we are gruffly told our boatman is on the other side of the dock. Approaching him within earshot of his companions, he mumbles nothing more than our departure time, and walks off. At sea, our boatman’s demeanor changes immediately to a jovial, entertaining host arranged at the behest of our sponsors, telling us stories of the sea, and of his Hashima. Forty-five minutes later, he lands us on Hashima, and three of us scramble ashore with a day’s supplies, cameras, and more film than I have ever carried.

After giving us his promise to return before sunset, our boatman maneuvers off station, leaving us alone with the silence of Hashima, awed, and not really sure of what to do next.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F3 20mm and XP2 Super.

The feeling of being in some far off post-apocalyptic land is immense. To experience a place where every way you turn is abandoned desolation, immediately overwhelms; you do not need to imagine what it would be like to stand in a once occupied city after a plague, The Bomb, or at the end of time.

Everything from the hospital, the school, factories, apartments, the bathhouse, the gymnasium, and the shrines stands vacant. Dark canyons of fallen lumber fill the streets, collapsed roofs abound, the detritus of a modern life is scattered under your feet as you walk – washed from the buildings by the wind, the rain, and the sea.

With little more to hear than a plaintive sea bird, and ominously the occasional clattering sound of falling masonry and concrete, we step over telephones, sake cups, toothbrushes, broken toys, milk bottles, and curiously, dental tools, all laying under foot as we scramble over what were once streets, and through the vacant buildings.

It is tempting to try and extract a man-against-nature message when coming to Hashima. The message here however is simply one of isolation, the feeling of vulnerability, and the opportunity to travel back in time to explore the lives of a coal mining island-city; to experience a snapshot of life in Japan from the 1960s and 1970s.

I cannot speak for my companions, but over the course of a day on Hashima as we document what we see, I go from being a photographer intent on making some serious commentary with my work, to gawking like an American tourist in Paris.

With the declining need for coal in the 1970s, Mitsubishi closed operations over a period of a few short months, ferrying the inhabitants back to the mainland with not much more than what they could carry. What they left behind in 1974, is the Hashima you see now.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium. Polaroid Type-665.

With the passing of ownership and control from the Mitsubishi Mining Corporation to the local Prefecture Office, a 220 meter public walkway has now been opened on the south end of the island. Twice-daily tours, either as a stand-alone Hashima access ticket, or as part of a regional historic pass, are now available. Hashima, as we experienced it, will most likely disappear with the expected advent of the eager day tripper.

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For more on abandoned Japan, click here.

Pulling up just before sunrise at the Salton Sea, California’s biggest lake, is a surreal experience. It is eerily quiet at this time of day, with only the sound of the lapping water, a few desolate cries of waking birds and the noise of Polaroid cameras as we pull the film through the rollers.  It reminds me of Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale The Road, with artifacts littering the area: abandoned and (partially) destroyed mobile homes, a chair in the water, a lone boot, a pink sink, a bent BBQ. One is left to wonder what has happened.

Salton City © Nathalie Farigu

At the beginning of the 20th century, when farmers settled in the Imperial Valley, there was a need to tap into the Colorado River for irrigation purposes. The California Development Company dredged two intake gorges just north of the Mexican border without using floodgates. For three years, the system worked well, but in the summer of 1904 the flow of water stopped when intakes became clogged with silt deposits from the river. At that point another intake gorge was created, and once again, a floodgate was omitted. This human error resulted in a massive flood, when in 1907 the Colorado River began to swell from heavy rainfall and snowmelt. The enormous volume of water breached a dike in the Imperial Valley, resulting in the two rivers carrying it all into what became then known as the Salton Sink, and creating the Salton Sea.

Bombay Beach

As a consequence of not having an outlet, the Salton Sea gets saltier every year; water is lost through evaporation, disappears and the salt stays behind. At the moment, the Salton Sea is about 25% saltier than the ocean. One can consider this ghastly place as one of the country’s largest ecological disasters: massive fish die-offs are common, due to a lack of oxygen in the water, and the presence of many parasites. The shores are lined with bones from dead fish.

It’s difficult to imagine now but in the 1950s the Salton Sea was a happening holiday spot, and the area brimmed with activity. As the sea transformed, its popularity waned. Developers started their exodus in the 1970s, and high water levels in the 1980s flooded many business and private properties, leaving them abandoned and in decay.

Massive fish die-offs at Bombay Beach.

After a day of driving around the Salton Sea, and a pile of Polaroids spread out on the car dashboard, we head down to the Ski Inn for a greasy patty melt. While at Bombay Beach’s only eatery, another word comes to mind besides “disaster” when trying to describe what we saw: dreamscape, horrific and beautifully surreal at the same time. Right now it is not apparent what will happen to the communities around the Salton Sea, but despite the evident decline, there are pockets of life at places such as Bombay Beach. As California’s needs evolve, a place may be found for the Salton Sea, a place that has yet to be defined.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these and other photographs on this issue.

Izu is the teardrop peninsula jutting out into the Pacific ocean a little over one hundred kilometers from the mass of gray concrete that is the Tokyo megalopolis. Izu is morning mists, bambooed hilltops and wooden inns nestled in the moist salt air wet from the steam of a hundred hot springs poking through the lush volcanic soil. Izu is where Tokyo’s trains from the 60s go to rust and die, happy recipients of the second most rainfall in Japan. It’s a romantics romance and though proximally near, the makeup of Izu makes for an Alice-through-the-looking-glass kind of trip. For, after all, it is the metamorphosis one undergoes in getting there that is arguably the most important part of the trip. Photographer Jon Ellis is interested in capturing the process of “getting there”, rather than what might be done once arrived.

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Jon Ellis will be participating in the four-person exhibition Fragments of Tokyo from 2/8/10 – 2/14/10 at Place M in Shinjuku. If you are in Tokyo please visit the gallery (click the link below).

Behind this overly paraphrased and idealized veneer of “the good life”, there exists a San Francisco Bay Area that is far more textured and heterogeneous than meets the eye, a world most easily seen from a low-speed, low-flying aircraft.

An hour in the sky reveals to the observer a past of industrial expansion and large scale infrastructure that is only superficially experienced by most of the locals on their morning commutes. Heavy industry maintains a prominent foothold in the region, a short drive away from the Bohemian pleasures of a city that lives very much within itself and its alluring distractions. The scale of nearby refineries, while notable when seen from a highway at 70 mph, is truly astounding from 2000 feet. The countless cylindrical fuel tanks, slender chimneys and intricate tubing feeding the belly of the petroleum transformation process are part of a carefully engineered machine that functions day in and day out to grease our modern economy.

The Bay Area is also home to one of the largest container ports in the Western United States, a major inter-modal container operation. According to the Port of Oakland website:

Strategically positioned adjacent to a major highway to Los Angeles, in the geographical heart of the economically vibrant Silicon Valley/San Francisco corridor, San Francisco International Airport (or SFO) remains one of the few large scale infrastructure projects intrinsically understood by the public, in terms of its relative physical footprint. As a result, SFO enjoys a correspondingly more prominent place in the public’s spatial memory, compared to the aforementioned Port of Oakland and regional oil refineries. This is in direct correlation to greater general access to the airport, as well as the ability for passengers to see its full physical extent during takeoff and landing.

Similar to the public’s understanding of the physical presence of SFO, there too is a familiarity with the scope of the region’s large scale highway and bridge systems.

Given the expanse of the body of water that is the San Francisco Bay, the resulting bridges that link the various margins are both world-famous and heavily used on a daily basis by local commuters. The Golden Gate Bridge requires no introduction, given its historical stature. The same can be said of the Bay Bridge, much beloved by the region’s residents, and more prominently located in relation to San Francisco’s urban core.

The highway infrastructure around the Bay serves a regionally significant area, and is more varied that what is at first suggested by the aforementioned iconic bridges. There are literally dozens of smaller scale bridges, viaducts, overpasses and highway junctions that overlap the area’s undulating geography. This intricately woven web of roadways becomes particularly apparent at 2000 feet, doting the observer with a broader understanding of the interconnected nature of the communities around the Bay.

San Francisco does not acknowledge its industry-heavy, automobile-prominent, petroleum-thirsty side with much relish. It leaves the notoriety of the car-city to the other major Californian Metropolis down south, to the detriment of efforts to solve its own problems of congestion and smog. In the land of banned plastic shopping bags, Critical Mass bicycle movement, “locavores”, and one of the highest household recycling rates in the US, it is easy to gloss over the prominence of the Bay Area’s industrial legacy and associated environmental challenges.

At 2000 feet certain things are more apparent.

Text and photos by Eddy Joaquim / Magnesium Photos. Cross-posted at f-stopped

I was sent to Marseille, south of France, to follow the path of Fabio Montale and make a cover for a book. A starting publishing company called Labyrint wanted to have a “film noir” oriented cover for their very first publication, Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Kheops – a dark and moody crime novel taking place there, in Marseille, now part of the legend of the city. I spent three days going to all the places described in the book, talking to old people who knew the – now deceased – author while putting my nose and my lenses into places better left alone during the day and night not really fit for tourism.

This gallery is better browsed while listening to John Coltrane’s most intense work or the (in)famous local Hip-hop band “I Am”, especially the album L’école du micro d’argent.

Arnaud De Grave is a gonzo photographer / journalist currently living in Denmark. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

Beyond the usual cliche, and outside of the normal expectation. These are the viewpoints a Magnesium photographer Skorj attempts to capture with his Polaroid camera. While Polaroid film is no longer being made, and many of these places have disappeared, their memories exist here, and in those who have seen an ordinary life…

An ancient mining town, a still-in-service 1950s’ train, an abandoned resort, a disused gas station, or a building whose occupants have long departed, they are all reduced with a common feeling of being lived in, well-used, and perhaps even loved.

If you are interested in using these in a commercial work, these photos are a small selection from a much larger body of work that is all available for licensing. Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information.