Since the days of the Meiwa Era, Asakusa’s Senso-ji temple in downtown Tokyo has hosted “Hozuki Ichi” (Ground Cherry Lantern Festival), in the blistering heat of mid-July. According to legend, a young samurai’s apprentice dreamed that the Japanese horse-riding, goblin-slaying, deity of fire, Atago Gongen, revealed to him the medicinal powers of a Houzuki pod (ground cherry plant pod resembling a Chinese paper lantern). The next morning, while cleaning the garden of Shiba-Seishoji Temple he found such a ground cherry plant pod and recalled the dream from the night before. He proclaimed that if one were to eat an unripe ground cherry at Atago Shrine on June 24, the festival day for the Buddhist deity Jizo, they could be cured of any ailments and their children would be cured of distemper. Taking the young Samurai apprentice’s advice, many people promptly tried this on June 24, discovering that it was mysteriously effective, alleviating the fever and discomfort experienced by pregnant women, and thus began calling it a wonder medicine. This was the beginning of the Hozuki-ichi Festival that has continued for over 200 years.

Accordingly, the Atago festival has become quite popular and over the decades, many temples have also adopted their own Hozuki Ichi festivals. The festival in Asakusa at Sensoji has since become larger and more popular than the one in Atago. On July 9th and 10th, the latter of which is also Yonman-rokusennichi (Day of 46,000 Blessings), over 450 vendors arrive to sell Houzuki lantern plants while another 350 come to peddle typical festival fare. Visitors nowadays come in their summer yukata, to buy a Houzuki plant, also said to ward off evil spirits and goblins from their home. Glass furin wind chimes ring across the festival grounds, aiding the laid back attitude, which despite the humidity, makes it one of Tokyo’s more pleasant and peculiar summertime celebrations.

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Students of automotive design and history will advise us the death of the rear-engine air-cooled car was dictated by a number of changing fashions and requirements. Pollution and noise requirements ensured two-strokes with their oil-burning lubrication systems, were phased out, and still more stringent regulations in many jurisdictions started to enforce additional requirements.

Making the job of NVH (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness) engineers difficult, the requirement for low drive-by ambient noise levels put the rear engined car at a natural disadvantage – with induction, combustion, and exhaust all at the same end, a rear-engined is naturally louder (from one end at least) than a car with its potential noise sources evenly distributed. Air-cooled versions perhaps more so.

The addition of a water-jacket for cooling, the deletion of large and many air-flow promoting openings, and an always running air-cooling fan, further makes water-cooled engines attractive. Requirements for heater and demister operation also favoring a water-cooled engine, with air-cooled engines requiring complex heat exchangers, flaps & valves, or even auxiliary engines to heat the cabin rapidly.

Abandoned car collections can be found all across Japan: kei-cars, sports cars, saloons, trucks, even buses. I’ve seen a few of each type, but only ever a smattering of air-cooled goodness. So, this collection in Saitama, on the Kanto Plain north of Tokyo, is even more remarkable as almost all of its neglected machines are rear-engine and air-cooled. A real find.

Honda 360, Subaru 360, Honda TC, Honda Vamos, Suzuki Cervo, Mazda Carol, all in various state of decay. The only ’360′ missing appeared to be the Mitsubishi. A large number of whole engines, cylinder heads, fans, cooling shrouds, interior trim, and the usual junkyard parts lay about from the collection.

Subaru 360 and Honda TC kei-trucks are reasonably common, as too are Suzuki Cervo, but Honda Vamos are quite rare, as is the Ford Anglia inspired four-cylinder Mazda Carol. The red one here is quite complete, with any missing parts appearing to lie scattered on the ground near by.

Also in the collection is a Mitsubishi Debonair, resplendent in funeral black, the only faux-pas being wire wheels, perhaps fitted in the 1970s when I suppose they were a popular accessory to make cars look “classy”. At least they are real wires, not just plastic hubcaps from proto-Auto Bacs.

The collection also includes a boat-tailed Alfa Spyder under cover, a few lesser Japanese classics, but also a car I’ve never seen before – a Daihastsu Compagno. Though not air-cooled, or rear-engined, its small convertible configuration would have made it an obvious nice-to-have for any car collector. In surprisingly good condition, its European style is perhaps reminiscent of a small Fiat or Alfa Romeo. A Daihatsu otaku might be aware of its design and marketing history?

Unlike some abandoned collections throughout Japan, this set is actively owned by someone and at least one of these interesting machines is posted for sale via on-line classic car sales, so it would be reasonable to assume offers would be accepted accordingly for others seen here.

Continuing the air-cooled in Saitama theme, just down the road from this collection, and made by the company that was later to produce the Subaru 360, an air-cooled Rabbit scooter was parked out front of the local scooter distributor…

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Great Barrier Reef Photography © Matt Greenfield / Magnesium & Jon Ellis / Magnesium

The photos depicting peaceful inlets of coastal water are of Taiji, a little known whaling town on the Pacific coast of Japan’s Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture. The area is known as Kumano, and is a world heritage site, renown for its pilgrim trail and striking temples set in both ancient Cedar forests and along pristine coastline, such as this. The jagged asymmetry of the windswept trees perched on jutting outcroppings of rocks, themselves constantly battered by the sea, feels like something out of the Ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige’s well-known repertoire.

Yet every September when a group of fishermen emerge from Taiji’s sheltering coves to catch the yearly dolphin migration in order to supply the world’s aquariums and dolphinariums with fresh dolphins (at around 200,000USD a head), these picturesque waters turn from cobalt blue to blood red in a matter of hours. How? Why? It depends on who you ask.

Last October, HESO asked Louie Psihoyos founder of OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and director of The Cove. Referring to the annual slaughter of approximately 2000 dolphins in the waters of Taiji, he said Japan is “a microcosm of the oceans.

Louie Psihoyos © Manny Santiago

“I really feel,” he continued, “we only have a couple decades to turn around what’s going on in the oceans. This generation coming up and maybe the next one are going to be the only generations to be able to fix this before it’s too late, before well, just break out all the champagne and drink it because…there’s not going to be anything left for anybody else…”

Jon Ellis, diver and photographer from the Magnesium Photography Agency, commented on diving the Great Barrier Reef:

The truth is that the reef really isn’t in that good condition. Even in areas where people rarely dive there is a lot of dead coral around. It’s true that it appears to be recovering – new growth dots the outcrops of dead coral, but the predominate atmosphere is not one of vibrant health.

While it’s hard not to buy into the popular notion of having repeatedly soiled our own diapers, to the point of ruination, it’s also hard not to applaud what a dedicated few are still doing to in trying to race the clock to help stem the tide (pun intended) of the current big biological catastrophe. Can Pollution, habitat loss, overfishing, global climate change and ocean acidification be overcome?

Save coral reefs for one, which constitute less than one percent of the ocean’s space, but are home to more than 25 percent of its fish and you save humanity. Kill them and you kill us. How are we planning on saving them from bleaching—a whitening of corals that occurs when symbiotic algae living within coral tissues are expelled? Bleached coral may recover over time or simply die out altogether. The truth is, as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

What we do know is that the seas around the country’s 20,000 miles of coastline are notoriously stingy. Enough so as to exclude them from the top fifty fishing nations, according to Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Magnesium Photo’s Matt Greenfield, an avid diver, recently photographed sharks around the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia—one of the only places in their coastal waters where sea-life is truly abundant.

Shark Feeding from ジーマー on Vimeo.

Finning sharks, dredging the ocean floor, selling tainted dolphin meat as whale: the animal rights argument rightfully doesn’t stop nearby Japan from scouring the world for what the Aussies—despite 9 million miles of territorial waters—have to import. Japan’s very long and extremely well protected fisheries arm—accounting for more than 15 percent of the worldwide catch—is often openly hostile, misleading and willfully ignorant toward their own customers and any such international pressure citing the human rights argument. Tsukiji Fish market in central Tokyo, the country’s seafood nerve center, is the largest in the world and is only one of many fish markets which have misrepresented dolphin and other cetacean meat selling as whale meat. Their spokespeople seem to have a preternatural gift for keeping the masses ignorant of the unsustainable truth, flouting international law and deflecting criticism from abroad.

Most Japanese people are completely unaware of this hunt – it’s the largest direct hunt of any whale, dolphin and porpoise in the world and is putting these animals at risk while producing hundreds of tonnes of toxic meat for human consumption.

Clare Perry – EIA Senior Campaigner

Meanwhile, many Japanese Fisheries apologists counter with statements like, “…in a world where we eat millions of chickens, cows and pigs, where we seem intent on plucking every salmon, cod, oyster and shrimp out of the ocean, is there something morally wrong about hunting a marine mammal like a dolphin?”

Not morally, but concerning consumer’s health, yes. Based on 1972 World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, Japan’s fisheries and Health Ministry (JMHLW) have been ignoring the self-imposed maximum contamination levels in seafood products of 0.3µg/g (parts per million – ppm) Methylmercury (MeHg) and 0.4ppm Mercury (Hg). Recently tested Dall’s porpoise samples (caught in northern Japan) being 1.02µg/g, almost three-and-a-half times the recommended limit, often more (Source: EIA-International). The giant Blue-fin Tuna, sold in sushi bars around the world as maguro, are regularly toxic as well. In fact any fish, or ocean going mammal over a certain size and age is likely a repository for dangerous levels of Mercury and any other heavy metals dumped in the ocean over the past 60 years.

Lucky then that not many are actually eating it. Certainly not the Japanese. According to the Guardian, of the 1,873 tons of whale meat processed in 2001, 70 tons went unsold. As a recent poll suggests, some 95 percent of the 1,047 respondents reportedly ate whale meat “very rarely”, had not eaten whale meat in a “long time”, or ate it “not at all”. 34.5 percent of the poll’s participants thought commercial whaling should resume, and 39.2 percent “neither agreed nor disagreed” with the idea.

One Japanese scholar with an opinion, Jun Morikawa of Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo, argues that whaling’s popularity—and therefore the fishing of all cetaceans—is largely a myth promulgated by certain governmental bodies and major players within the whaling industry. Though it seems that as long as 39.2 percent of the world “neither agree nor disagree” with any of this, our oceans will be in trouble.

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More can be read by downloading the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) Poisonous Policies (EIA International, 2008)

The numerous tattered wooden groynes, broken concrete slabs, and piles of housing bricks bear witness to nature’s relentless attacks. Many of these defenses date back to the period of time after the North Sea Flood of 1953, and in the area around Happisburgh (pronounced /ˈheɪzbrə/) they are really showing their age. Ragged wooden piles, twisted iron reinforcements, and heaps of concrete are all that remain of these monuments to Canute.

A managed retreat from the most vulnerable areas has been proposed. The plan would let the marshes regain their role as a buffer for the flood tides, but the local residents are resisting, asking for more money to be invested into the Sisyphean task of protecting the coast.

And yet, there is a stark beauty in the landscape / seascape. This delicate border of sand and flint cliffs form the ‘last ditch’ defense of the flat Norfolk hinterlands.

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When I was an EMT trainee I did a series of ride-alongs on the ambulances of the San Francisco Fire Department. I noticed that the majority of calls were for those referred to as “frequent fliers” or repeat patients of the EMS system–primarily poor, homeless, mentally ill, disabled, alcoholics and drug abusers. Their perpetual requests for emergency care are predominantly for non-life-threatening emergencies, and the constant attention costs tax-payers millions of dollars a year.*

I later realized that I needed to go back out on these calls with a camera. I feel it is important to capture the magnanimous dedication of the San Francisco Fire Department’s EMS Division and hope my photographs will (unofficially) support the Homeless Outreach and Medical Emergency Team (HOME) program—a collaboration between the SFFD and the Health Department that joins social services and medical care to help the recurrent patients get the help they need without having to call 911. In some cases I did not gain permission to show the patient’s face, and I needed to creatively block the shot. Most of the time they were willing when I told them why I was shooting.

This is a work in progress.

—

One night of repeats #1 …

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We rolled up on this man as he was being cuffed by SFPD. According to the caller who reported him, he was under the influence of narcotics and running around in circles in the middle of an intersection. He was determined to be under the influence of psychopathic narcotics and taken to San Francisco General Hospital.

Later in the evening we had a call at the Montgomery BART Station, where a man had a complaint of chest pains. We found him on the floor and loaded him into a chair and took him out to an ambulance for transport.

One night of repeats #2 …

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This shift started out with a multiple vehicle rollover accident on the 101/280 split. Accidents are common here as drivers race across all lanes to get on the 101 from the previous onramp from 280.

Later that night we had a call from an intoxicated homeless man who called about chest pains which really ended up being a scab on his hand. He was quite a character. He noticed my camera and played the air guitar for me. A friend of his came by, taunted him, sung along with him, and gave him a dollar and a slice of watermelon.

One night of repeats #3 ...

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This man was just woken up from an overdose. He wasn’t too happy to see us, but calmed down a bit when we let him know that he would have expired if we hadn’t been called by his friends. He was then transported for further observation.

Special Thanks for this project goes to:

• Paramedic Captain John Cavanaugh, SFFD
• EMS Division Chief Pete Howes,  SFFD
• Paramedic Captain Niels Tangherlini, SFFD, HOME Team Director

* “According to figures obtained from the Department of Public Health, in 2007, 108 individuals cost the city $4.6 million in ambulance and emergency room fees. That’s an average of nearly $43,000 a year for each person.” City finds funds for money-saving program, C.W. Nevius– SF Gate, page  B – 1  (1/6/2009)

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com or use the Contact Form for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

–G. B. Shaw

As one who believes geographical allegiances should be local rather than national and who has only the dilettante’s interest in competitive sports, I find the fanatical devotion characterizing the World Cup as amusing as the tournament itself. The World Cup produces intense feelings, which manifest themselves in a variety of aspects, including facial paint, lucky charms, bizarre costumes, wild inebriation and customized cheering. For most followers of the competition, the World Cup is an opportunity to feel a uniquely communal agony or levity, dependent on the outcome of a match to which the fan has had no part in, but who undergoes the winning or losing as if it were one’s own experience.

In Japan, this loyalty involved some ungodly match times due the time difference East Asia enjoys in relation to South Africa. When Japan advanced to the Round of 16 after defeating Denmark, 3 – 1, thousands of fans erupted into the streets to celebrate the victory. It was just after 5:00 AM on a muggy Friday morning and Hachiko Crossing, the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world, erupted in such pandemonium that the casual non-fan would be forgiven for believing that Japan defeated Brazil to win the tournament itself, rather than just the first of five rounds, a feat accomplished by fifteen other teams. Were such celebrations a spontaneous outburst born from low expectations? Was it a fit of pride, anomalous good news for a nation suffering through two decades of slow growth that has seen their economic cachet dwindling against China and other emerging East Asian markets? Or was it simply inevitable that thousands of young fans staying up all night drinking beer would want to get down and party when their team won?

To say the least, witnessing such an outburst in Japan is highly unusual for a culture famed for its social reticence. The Japanese may open themselves to others, but rarely do they thrust their joys so deliriously upon strangers. The peculiarly Japanese cartoon types— exuberant in blue superhero suits, Yukio Hatoyama gag masks, and bright blue afro wigs (blue being the team color)— worked the fans like deft cheerleaders, gathering crowds and stirring them into a frenzy. Thousands of people streaming from Shibuya’s teeming bars towards the central train station threw off their exhaustion to improvise a jig with strangers, actions they would view with bewilderment in more sober circumstances.

The atmosphere had that rare whiff of danger, as one might expect in an environment compounded by sleeplessness, alcohol, and a sports victory. Yet this danger did not seem so much physical as it did psychological. You could hear it being screamed and sung in wild cacophonous eruptions, “Nippon! Nippon! Nippon!”— a cry as aggressive as any outburst of “USA! USA! USA!” to those not given to national self-mythologizing. They say one man’s meat is another man’s poison; thus the peril, which sometimes requires the competitive energy of a sporting event to make evident, is nationalism.

Like nearly all countries, Japan has its share of right-wingers, nativists, and xenophobes. Though they are ostensibly a minority, their soapboxes and bullhorns, ubiquitous at train stations and embassies, mean they are politically loud. However, they seem to be a dying bunch, grumpy old men with long memories of losing a great war.

I was thus surprised then to witness Japan’s Imperial Flag brandished by a heap of twentysomething soccer fanatics. There it was billowing in the morning wind with all the suggestiveness of history dyed in the bright red rays emanating from a rising sun. You might call it beautiful if you didn’t know better but for those who do, it symbolizes Japan’s catastrophic attempt at empire: colonies in Manchuria and Korea, gory battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa and of course, the apocalypses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki— the fluttering cloth becoming an object of collective pride for hundreds of young, intoxicated, impressionable young men.

But soccer teams, like governments, do not always succeed in what they set out to do. Promises cannot always be kept. Despite a plucky performance the Japanese team was eliminated from the tournament in a tense, hard-fought finish against Paraguay. Those fans screaming the loudest will have to process the humility in losing with their convictions of national pride. This synthesis can only bring them into the greater fold of humanity, which may be the point of the World Cup after all.

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IN 2009 Arnaud De Grave was commissioned to design a book cover for Labyrint, a Copenhagen-based publishing company translating French crime novels to Danish. Sent to Marseille to walk the path of the book’s protagonist, De Grave photographed the seamy underbelly of the dark city captured in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Kheops, a tale of “Lagavulin, jazz and beautiful girls”. Some of his results, which have hung in galleries across Denmark, are selected here.

For their next project, Caryl Férey’s Zulu, the action takes place in South Africa. A timely, but expensive location shoot for the up and coming publishing house was scrapped at De Grave’s insistence that he could recreate the macabre Johannesburg setting, where the value of human life is judged on a quid pro quo basis, simply by renting a studio and hiring a model. As one of the main characters of the novel, if not the heroine, De Grave captures the enigmatic soul of the dancer who performs her zulu war-influenced dances in smoky clubs shrouded in violence and mystery.

Zulu (Caryl Férey, 2008)

The cover shot is a close-up portrait of model Kristina Remne chosen for its austerity. Yet when the polished and reserved monochrome image on the finished cover is contrasted to the outtakes of Kristina dancing in the hellfire flash of the novel’s fiery climax, the viewer/reader begins – through De Grave’s work- to understand the clarity of the author’s vision.

Another selection of black and white imagery can be viewed at the BOP Association Gallery.

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

It had been ten years since I was last in Berlin and was marveling from the top of the Reichstag’s large viewing terrace at the immense facelift the city has undergone when I heard the collective voices of hundreds chanting screeds alongside the cries of an indecipherable (Ich spreche kein Deutsch) man using a bullhorn coming from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, the border between the old East / West Berlin. Curious, I left the tourists behind me at the refurbished Reichstag and approached the Pariser Platz as the crowd’s chanting crescendoed, erupting into cheers when I passed beneath the gate’s statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory.

Not understanding what they were saying, and despite not having any clear idea what was actually happening, it was quickly clear that a great number of Palestinians, Turks, Syrians (identifiable by their flags) and others were extremely unhappy. I immediately began snapping photos and realized that I was more accepted within the surging Muslim crowd dressed in hijabs and kuffiyehs, felt more at home with the protesters, given free reign to shoot as I pleased by them than the stoic and disapproving police covered head to toe in riot gear lining the perimeter of the square.

Asking a Syrian woman boasting her birth country’s flag, I quickly got the details:

“These hundreds of people are gathered here in Pariser Platz beneath Brandenburg Gate today (Friday, June 4th 2010) to protest the Israeli raid on six ships comprising the the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla, carrying more than 600 hundred passengers. They killed nineteen people and injured hundreds. This is unacceptable. They must be stopped!”

Three Youths Hug the Pariser Platz Sign beneath Brandenburg Gate during the Gaza Protest

The attack, which occurred approximately 65 kilometers of the Gaza coast in international waters, has been condemned worldwide and has brought well-deserved attention to what some call at minimum an illegal blockade, yet one that the Likud government spokesman Mark Regev maintains “was totally within its rights under international law to intercept the ship and to take it to the port of Ashdod”. Much more than just another “incident” within controversial areas many are unwilling to wade into, the use of what the majority of the protesters deem to be unnecessarily deadly force against boatloads of international journalists and writers as well as the death of nine Turkish activists, has gotten the attention of Turkey, Israel’s biggest trading partner and up to now, most trustworthy regional ally.

Turkey, which has seemed to usurp the role of Mideast leader of late, may have the power to apply unseen pressure on their their Mediterranean neighbor, possibly more so than U.S. president Barack Obama’s so far unheeded advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lift the blockade against the Palestinians. They meet in Washington on July 6th.

None of the people here were willing to sit down at the nearby Starbucks to discus Israel’s claims to homeland security after the unilateral action by its military, which many of its own citizens condemned as overly harsh.

Just as soon as I had seen a fraction of the new Berlin (without the hundreds of cranes towering above last century’s skyline), where the multi-ethnic citizens use of freedom of speech seemed to equal or greater to anything I had ever experienced, I realized that more than just the usual protest, something massive was being stirred, an immense stand was being taken, with a greater number of countries involved than ever before, one from which we don’t emerge unaffected nor unscathed. I had a train to catch, an article to write and negatives to develop, but more than more of the same supposed unbiased reportage, I had to look deep to see that there was no clear understanding, no simple cut and dried answer, no unaffected people. The problem is growing and more and more people are becoming involved everyday, some violently, even fatally so. I have to ask myself if the answer really lies in more walls, borders and flags.

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Manny Santiago is a photographer / journalist currently circumnavigating the globe. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

“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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Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com or use the Contact Form for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway — Shuto Kōsoku Dōro — is Tokyo’s answer to handling large volumes of traffic traversing the megalopolis.

The first sections were opened in time to showcase Tokyo for the 1962 Olympics. Not designed as an unlimited speed road, its main purpose was to ferry cars around at moderate speeds, unhindered by the non-car friendly Tokyo streets.

While some sections snake alongside rivers, or behind buildings at ground level, most of the road sections are elevated above ground, or tunnel under major areas such as the Imperial Palace or other surface roads.

Many sections of road deck are multilevel, often consisting of four or more layers. Because of limitations of the landscape, buildings, subterranean infrastructure (other roads and train lines), the often convoluted elevated sections, tunnels, dividers, ramps, interchanges, and tollbooths all conspire to enhance the legend of the Shuto as being a challenging road to drive, at any speed.

The Shuto also includes the Tokyo Wan Aqualine, a 15km straight-line blast under, and then over, Tokyo Bay (wan) to Chiba. The Aqualine used to be a ‘private’ road, built by private interests and with a toll value set at the wish of the operator. Like many private roads in Japan (such as the Atsugi Toll Road to Fuji-san), they used to be un-policed for speed limits. This open status promoted street racing gangs, sometimes badging themselves with ’250′ or ’300′ patches – representing their supposed topped-out kilometer-per-hour speed achievements on public roads.

Sadly, or perhaps for the better, speed limits on private toll roads are now policed — not before I was able to enjoy nailing the throttle on a Ferrari V8, roof down, in a vain attempt to chase down some hairdresser in his RX-7. I am not sure what sounded better: the five-valve V8 from Modena, or the Hiroshima rotary cracking and spitting fire on the over-run as we screamed through the tunnel section. At some ridiculous speed, I chickened out, and watched the RX-7 disappear into the distance.

While street racers have used sections for racing, notably the Wangan (Bayshore) sections, the Shuto gained global exposure with the 1998 release of Shutoku Battle, a Dreamcast console game known as Tokyo Extreme Racer for export markets, accurate for its representation of the Shuto’s layout and surrounding features of Tokyo; down to being able to see my old apartment as you raced past at high speed. I still wake in the middle of the night when hearing a loud exhaust, thinking perhaps I am still in my bed next to the Akasaka-Roppongi-Knot (‘ARK’), a particularly notorious set of bends known to claim the unwary.

Working nearby to the Shuto too, and while enjoying car talk at work one day, one of the senior managers — perhaps sixty years of age — commented that he too enjoyed fast cars, driving a Legacy Turbo. As a joke I asked, “So Tanaka-san, do you get up at 02:00 and go racing around the Shuto?”

“Of course!” he blurted out rapidly, looking at me as if I was mad to even ask such a question.

One notable site for all car types to congregate is the Shuto’s Daikoku Futo – halfway between Yokohama and Tokyo on the Wangan route.

With no other facilities except a gas station and some fast food sellers, it is perhaps a natural place to congregate, talk about rides, and enjoy the sounds of fast cars screaming overhead on the elevated sections.

The Parking Area (‘PA’), on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays is often full of interesting rides. Not only for legendary Japanese cars like GT-Rs, twin-cammed Toyota and fast rotaries, but bikes too, the Porsche, Ferrari & Lamborghini clubs sometimes show up, as do a regular smattering of bozosoku and general shakotan style aficionados.

On the access roads outside the PA, in front of the local koban, less responsible drivers have been known to practice their mountain drifting skills. The massive tire marks, rubber-marbles in the gutter, and the sometimes dinged guard-rail, are all obvious signs of some serious drift work.

YouTube has numerous postings, including bemused police in their koban, and their attempts to shut the drifters down.

The new Yamate Tunnel adds another 10.9km of fun to the run from Ikebukero to Meguro. It features some remarkable engineering, including a twelve-level climb from the subterranean run to nine levels above ground to join the Chuo Expressway at Hatsudai – this up-and-down roller coaster ride alone is worth the ¥700 entrance fee.

While I ride the Shuto two or three times per week, commuting on my barge-like Maxam scooter, the best time of course is as recommended by Tanaka-san in his Subaru: late evenings, or early mornings. Chasing the fire-breathing RX-7s and GT-Rs is a lot more pleasurable when I can forget the camera, and enjoy the wail of an Audi V8, a Nissan inline six, or a high-revving Mazda rotary next to me as we scream through the tunnels and wind through the many routes around Tokyo.

All at the recommended speed limit of course.

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Skorj is a photographer/journalist living in Japan. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

In the film Messengers (Yasuo Baba, 1999) one of the protagonists says to our Lycra-clad heroine, ‘You look like a race queen.’ Parochially translated for American audiences as, ‘You look like a slut‘, this missive unintentionally sums up the role of race queens in the modern world.

A variation of the Formula 1 car racing European pit lane girls (who are supposedly present to hold umbrellas over drivers), race queens – or ‘campaign girls’ – are frowned upon in many Western countries as examples of sexism, and of cynical marketing for an otherwise male-dominated industry.

Contrary to the fall-off of sexist advertising campaigns for cars and the automotive industry globally, the race queen still survives in Japan. Major trade shows and industry events in Japan might have seen a reduction in their race queen populations recently, but this is more a sign of economic austerity over any update to sexual perspectives in Japan.

Buoyed by their high status in the modeling industry in Japan, super race queens continue to generate large fan-bases in their own right, commanding high appearance monies, and often driving their own careers accordingly.

The 2010 Formula 1 season opened in Melbourne recently, with a series of very mildly dressed pit lane girls (‘more modern’ was the statement). The same weekend held the annual Tokyo Motorcycle Show at Tokyo’s Big Sight in Odaiba. Present in a bewildering array of skimpy clothes the race queens continued to pout, pose and preen for the cameras as they do countless times a year across Japan.

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If any threat exists to race queens in Japan, it will not be from a waning popularity in their hardcore otaku fan base, nor will it likely come from ‘safety concerns’ associated with their skimpy clothing, and it will certainly not come from any change in perception of the role of women in Japan. Any further demise in race queen populations will surely be a result of purely economic motives.

As for our Lycra-clad heroine in ‘Messengers’, in Japan at least, she triumphs, beats her derisive competitor and wins the heart of the leading man, making a lot of money along the way…

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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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There is a universal drive for gambling that I am at loss for understanding. Some people bet on horses, dogs, on anything that is able to run more or less straight in a suitably controlled environment. Ostriches, even! However, these arrangements are really elaborate random number generators. Actually each different type of betting service that exists is basically a way of crafting “exciting” random number generators. If, for example, you go to a cock fight (as in Magnesium Photographer Alan Dejecacion’s Sunday at the Cockfight), you get a binary-based random number generator. On the other side of the scale, the odds of you winning the French Lotto is seriously against you: 7 balls within a set of 49. My mind turned into goo when I tried to calculate the probabilities. I soon found out on my trip to a little known town in India that there is no stupid way to buy and sell dreams.

Waiting for the shooting to happen

Shillong lies in the province of Meghalaya in northeast India. There the local people bet on random numbers using an original and unique random number generator: one group of old men shoot arrows at a target made out of straw tied against a wooden pole, then another group of men count the arrows. The bets are made on the last two digits, i.e. if you place your bet on 42, and the shooter manages to stick 442 arrows in the target, you win. If the shooters are having a bad day or drinking too much tea and miss, you can go drown your sorrow in booze. Simple. Fascinating idea.

Being in the vicinity, I felt the urge to investigate and have a look for myself. I was very excited about trying and find out about the whole thing. Not that the prospect of seeing old men play with archery equipment is not an exciting one, but I am more into people’s reactions than in the thing which causes the reaction. After some misguided directions from random strangers, I found the spot. Indeed, the place is fairly small and easy to miss, a patch of not very well tended grass, really. When I got there people were mostly busy trying to catch glimpses of some sort of action happening in the stadium on the other side of the river, where the clamour crowd was clapping and giving hints that some sort of important sport event was developing. My guess was cricket. Cricket is huge in that part of the world.

Shooting!

I wasn’t totally blown away by what I discovered. Indeed, the action was far from frenetic. There was the preparation phase when everybody carefully laid arrows in front of him, readied their bows and smoked. Then one of the men cried something incomprehensible, and everybody started shooting. Relentlessly yet calmly, and almost without pause, they sat or crouched behind some invisible line and shot arrow after arrow. Some didn’t even blink. When they ran out of arrows, everybody gathered around the target and started removing the arrows mingling within the bundle which were not properly stuck into the target. While the judges counted and sorted them by fitting them ten by ten into what resembles a barbecue grill, the archers took care of finding back their own misdirected arrows. Though I suspect that at some point they would also go retrieve their good ones, I have to admit that I didn’t stick around long enough to witness this.

Now the sorting begins ...

All this takes place without excitement, calmly, while drinking tea and commenting on the weather. At some point, while taking pictures, I found myself in front of one of the archer. He had stopped shooting and was waiting patiently until I got out of the way. He could have offered me a cup of the aforementioned tea! Where was all the fever of gambling? Where were the shaky hands, the screaming ladies waiting for some blood to be shed, waiting for that target to eat dust? Where is the damn arrow I should have had piercing my hat, à la John Ford?

I had some tea and on my way back I climbed on top of a building under construction to see what was happening in the stadium. It was a football match, not cricket. Luckily I hadn’t bet on that…

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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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Photography Curated by Sean Bonner

What is the mystery of photography? Why do we love the static image? What is it that these fragments of reality, frozen in time tell us? What is it about the photograph’s ability to transcend commonplace existence that has taken it from an unrecognized set of chemical reactions to the most popular and life-changing art-form the history of the world has ever seen?

Are we seeking knowledge of our place within the greater universal complexity? Or could it be that we are a conceited bunch of heretic animals in love with posing for and fawning over our own graven image? Is it not rather that we just love to command machines, fiddle with knobs, push brightly colored buttons and play with toys?

Ahh, toys. Ask most people when they started to fall in love with photography and many, if not most will hark back to the golden days of their childhood, when life was simpler, the sun shone brighter and film was, as the only option available, still cheap. Most photographers of today who were raised in the odd limbo generation of the 70s and 80s grew up on one or more of the futuristic Polaroid instant cameras kicking around the house. Or maybe you had the cartridge-based 110 film and disc cameras, invented by Kodak and popularized with the Kodacolor VR, or any number of short-lived point and shoot cameras, that weren’t toy cameras per se, but today can be found lining the discount bins of used camera resellers and garage sales alike, the world over.

When Fuji Camera introduced the Fujipet camera, marketed to a solely Japanese audience, this plastic camera would go on to introduce the hitherto western concept of leisure combined with the snapshot, for use by the whole family. From the instruction manual, “With the Fujipet Camera you can the pictures very easily just as you manipulate your knife and fork…The Fujipet Camera enjoys great popularity among children, mothers and all the members of the family and affords happiness in all homes.”

What about the Hong Kong novelty manufacturer Great Wall Plastic Factory, in first producing the Diana, which in turn spawned tens of hundreds of clones, that unwittingly launched the modern day toy camera revolution. They were just trying to make a fast buck. In doing so, they made history.

Thanks in large part to Mr. T.M. Lee – inventor of the Holga – is it true that anyone can be a photographer?

Despite all signs to the contrary, it was not the original goal of Mr. Lee, nor any of the other manufacturers, to make toys, but rather to ensure that people were fascinated and interested in creative film photography. As the Chinese middle class grew due to economic reform of the 80s – and with it buying power and hunger for better technology – many cheaper products, like Holga, lost ground and were nearly completely lost in the shuffle toward the new paradigm of the 90s tech boom.

As artists, amateur photographers and institutions of higher learning got in on the ground floor of the Holga Revolution, business boomed for Mr. Lee and Universal Electronic- largely in part to the Austrian-based Lomographic Society licensing and repackaging the Holga (as done with the glass-lensed Lomo LC-A – often thought of as a “toy” as well) in marketable and highly profitable kits. He was amazed at the resurgence of his twenty year-old baby, remarking it was “out of my imagination!” and smartly thought to capitalize on this newfound “Toy Camera” popularity by diversifying into a wider range of products. Add-ons for the Holga or completely new cameras (the Micro 110, 6×9/6×12 Pinhole, 3D Stereo, Twin Lens Reflex, a whole range of 135mm cameras, fish-eye lenses, color flashes, etc.) became profitable ways to expand into areas previously unimagined. The future was very bright indeed.

To ask what is the future of photography is too big for anyone to take on except in bite-size chunks. One might be well served to look back to the origins of capturing images for answers to why images- and especially those taken with shoddily-crafted plastic parts which often “leak” light, vignette uncontrollably, and capture images so randomly that the photographer would have no guarantee that any exposure will come out at all- have transfixed us deer-like in the headlights of a tsunami of cause and effect. Many of which have such wide ranging societal repercussions that we would be smart to admit no one really has any idea of what’s happening, let alone what’s on the horizon.

To extrapolate digital photography as a direct result of the Toy Camera boom, to say that Holga created the digital point and shoot in your mobile phone, to credit Hong Konger novelty and flash manufacturers with the digital paradigm as well as their own eventual decline, is not too far a stretch. What will emerge from the next few digital decades, after the Hipstamatic iPhone filter fad has worn off? A perpetual backlash against time-tested, though also time-consuming, archival methods or as Mr. Lee experienced when the unpredictable wave of economic tide turned the middle class Chinese off his product and hipsters on – a rebirth of interest in film and more importantly, sales?

Read the continued Interview with Holga Limited’s Christine So here.

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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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Japanese women have one of the longest life expectancies in the world, yet there is a neighbourhood in Tokyo where many go to find promises and prayers on even more years. The secret to this Japanese fountain of youth is not some sacred spring or historical holy visitation however- the key to longevity in Japan is apparently to be found in something as simple as red underwear.

Sugamo, located in Tokyo’s northern metropolitan Toshima ward, is one of the areas of the capital commonly known as shitamachi, literally “downtown.” While in the west this might conjure up images of sparkling avenues of retail excess, theatrical name drops and glittering nights of cocktail hedonism, in Sugamo it simply means that the buildings and the outlook of the people have not really changed much since the 1950s. This is an area of post-war traditions and frugality where people rarely leave their immediate surroundings. Consequently, the area has evolved its own booming micro-culture that caters to the older generation in much the same way the fashionable areas of the city attract and enthrall the young. Indeed, Sugamo is often called the Harajuku of old ladies (Tokyo’s Harajuku district is famous for its cutting edge fashion and youth culture).

The heart of Sugamo lies in the the Togan-ji Temple where the statues of Toganuki Jizō and Arai Kannon promise cures and blessings on long life and health. All the attendant paraphernalia of religious observance abound: monks beg alms and offer prayers of longevity in return, health foods and lucky charms are sold, and in the temple grounds itself the statue of Arai Kannon is purported to offer those who rub it with a wet cloth a miracle cure in the corresponding area of the body. The worries of age are also a rich source of income for charlatan healers and medics who set up stalls in the temple grounds, and along the main shopping street known as Jizō Dori.

Perhaps the area’s most famous purchase is its iconic red underpants however. Red is a colour believed to offer those who wear it vigour and freedom from sickness, but this is just one of the many items available in the stores on Jizo Dori. Unlike other shopping streets in Tokyo, this is not a place where brand names count for much, unless of course you are a dedicated follower of the latest name in mobility scooters or want designer walking canes. The items for sale are generally cheap and familiar, the fashion is large-sized and low chic and everything is designed for the comfort and patronage of the older generation.

For Sugamo, however, business has never been better and while it will never be “fashionable” the growing number of older people in Japan is sure to keep the streets and temples of Sugamo popular for the foreseeable future. Far from the bright lights and neon of the Tokyo’s stereotypical image, these streets offer a unique insight into “old” Japan.

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Being in a church for a funeral service and thinking about a clown might be weird. Looking around and seeing actual clowns would be surreal.

Many people tend to equate clowns with the circus, but there was one man who took clowning around from its origins in the Commedia dell’Arte- with which he shared his Italian origins- and into the world of the Pantomine, eventually culminating into the modern clown seen all over the world today. That man was Joseph Grimaldi, born in London in 1779, the son of a ballet master. An invalid from the years of intense physical effort his act required, he was introduced to the stage before he was two and retired at forty-five years-old. The rest of his life was spent in poverty, yet comedians – and particularly clowns – are, perhaps surprisingly, a group of serious folks and many came together to finance their inspirational father’s remaining years. “Like vaulting audition, I have overleaped myself and pay the penalty in advanced old age. It is four years since I jumped my last jump, filched my last oyster, boiled my last sausage and set in for retirement,” Joseph Grimaldi would say in 1828 at Covent Garden, London, during a show meant to raise money for his benefit. He passed away some years later, after being carried home by his friend George Cook from his spot close by the chimney of a pub he frequented daily.

Nearly two hundred years later, clowns still memorialize him on the first Sunday of February. It is indeed a surreal experience attending a church service for a pantomime clown. Stranger still when, as hinted, many of the congregation are themselves clowns, in full costume and make-up, drawn to this service from all over the world. Young and old, though mainly old, gather at the All Saints’ Church in Dalston, East London, to remember and celebrate the life of Joseph Grimaldi, the clown Joey.

Though it might surprise most people to hear that this still rolls on, Grimaldi’s legacy continues to live.

“A little old woman,
her living she got by selling hot codlins,
hot, hot, hot.
And this little old woman,
who codlins sold,
tho’ her codlins were hot,
she felt herself cold.
So to keep herself warm she thought it no sin to fetch for herself a quartern of ……..”

“Gin” the crowd shouted.

“Oh, for shame!” the clown answered mockingly.

Famous routine song of JOSEPH GRIMALDI (1779-1837)

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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.

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

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.

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

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).

The major problems facing the human race are massive as ever and show no sign of abating anytime soon. Resource wars are becoming the norm. The environment needs a breath of fresh air. American obesity is getting serious (picture a muumuu-clad Homer Simpson when his fingers were too fat to dial the phone). Despite the overwhelming negativity slowing most forward-thinking legislative bodies, there seems to be a palpable worldwide trend toward cleaner living. Maybe it’s the economic recession talking or perhaps people are finally getting the idea that spending and consumption can be controlled to the gain of everyone, even those invisible third-worlders starting to demand their fair share of the world’s resources over in…wherever they are.

Smoking too appears to be declining. Even in Asia, where cigarettes are cheap- ¥300~¥350 or about €2.50 / $3.50 per pack. Yet despite all efforts to the contrary, the culture of cigarettes persists. Cigarettes have an attitude about them. Smoking is (still) cool. Smokers have a swagger. We see this in movies, on television and in advertisements that target youth. Just watch Jon Hamm’s implacable Don Draper chain-smoke at his ad agency in AMC’s historically correct Mad Men for examples of mid-1960s societal mores amid the peak of doctor-endorsed smoking and compare to now. What America was in the Madison Avenue 60s, Japan was in the opulent 80s. A commonly heard phrase of the time being, “65% of men smoke and 35% of women smoke, which means 100% of Japan smokes.”

Slowly but surely times have changed. Unless the boss says otherwise, smoking in the office is basically a no-no. The same goes for almost any enclosed indoor space, at least in California, New York, Hawaii, (despite the U.S. leading the charge against the tobacco lobby, no national legislation has been enacted, leaving the decision up to state and local governments), most of Europe and elsewhere where the government has moved to reduce health risks caused by second-hand smoke. More than two-thirds of the German population does not smoke. Less than one-third smokes regularly. Men smoke more (32% of the total sum of men smoke while only 22% of women puff). Consumption of cigarettes among youth is declining not due to smoking bans, but rather information campaigns alongside a shift in the characteristic affectations of role models.

In Denmark, the small popular bars called bodegas packed nightly with patrons would die- especially the ones with names on little brass plates in front of stools at the bar: ‘You cannot sit there, this is Lars’ chair.’- if these regulars stopped showing up to get their daily dose of booze simply because they can’t top it off with a share of nicotine.

And that is where it all goes wrong. If the bar is under forty square metres, then you can smoke inside. The sane man in all of us says, “The smaller the room the more prone it would be to become really smoky and dangerous.” But talking to the man in the street about these places was surprising. “It’s fair that smoking is prohibited, so I can bring my wife and kids without stinking afterwards,” iterated a few patrons while lighting stick after stick and discoursing on the matter. None of them was very concerned about the health of the bartender. ”Who cares about him? It’s his choice to be here…”

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

In a show of defiance against the gray economy, southern Florida continues to attract millions of visitors for fun in the winter sun.

In the 1980s it was the destination of choice for underage binge drinking, recreational drug use, and casual sex.

These days Florida attracts nearly one in four US retirees.

Due to its year-round warm climate, low tax burden, and glut of golf courses, Florida now leads the country in percentage of residents over the age of 65.

The health of Florida’s economy is now more than ever reliant on the wealthier retiree until the real estate market can recover, a likely distant reality.

Warning! The following may contain images that are disturbing or graphic.

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

Photos by Derek Arnwine / Magnesium Photos
Text by Jim O’Connell / Magnesium Photos

Today, we’re featuring a set of photos by Magnesium photographer Derek Arnwine.
Derek’s been living in Tokyo for as long as anyone can remember. He lives in one of the suburbs outside Central Tokyo, in one of the places “where people actually live and work” around Tokyo and has for many years.

Derek is a talented photographer in all of the ways you’d expect, but with a twist; He knows how to operate his camera of course, knows how to compose a shot, but what sets him apart is the amazing effect he has upon his subjects—they all smile.

It’s not just the practiced smile that people summon when being photographed, but real, joyful smiles with a glint in their eyes. Derek brings out a sense of delight that is infectious. He doesn’t sneak his shots to capture candor or try to blend in, not that he could as a six-foot-one foreign man with a hearty laugh. He simply has a way with people.

Derek’s been shooting a project for some time that I’ve enjoyed watching develop, a project he calls “Gokurousama“.

The word may be a mouthful, but the meaning is simple, so simple that it’s too often forgotten these days—it means, basically, “I appreciate what you are doing. Thank you.” It’s what you say to the people who do their jobs, especially the times they might go out of their way, outside their job descriptions, to make their service a little bit more accommodating.

That’s what Derek captures with alacrity. Nowhere to be found are the stereotypes of slacking temp workers or overwrought salary men. He seeks out the people at work and captures the pride with which they go about it, be it train conductors, garbage truck drivers, locksmiths or the girls who serve his bagels and coffee. (He does seem to take particular delight in his bagels and coffee, or perhaps it’s the girls?)

There’s another thing worth noting about his work: He’s licensed it as Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial, which means that if you are working on a project that you won’t be making money from, such as your personal blog, you are welcome to use his work and even remix it into a new creation. Just don’t forget to credit him and perhaps offer your own gokurousama, in hopes that he keeps up the splendid work.

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.

Mr. Arnwine is also available for commissioned editorial, travel, corporate and portraiture photography.

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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

This piece has been produced with content from the following Magnesium members:
Japan by Jim O’Connell / Magnesium
Denmark by Arnaud De Grave / Magnesium
Holland by Nathalie Farigu / Magnesium
Additional photographs by:
Pete Barr-Watson / Magnesium
David Teter / Magnesium

On July 3rd in 1916, Lawrence “Chubby” Woodman, dropped a few battered clams into the fryer he normally used for French fries at his roadside stand in Essex, Massachusetts, not having any idea that almost a hundred years later, I’d be sitting here in Tokyo, craving a hot dog roll filled with his creation.

My ex-wife introduced me to clam rolls in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a short drive from her family’s summer cottage. “Ooh, clam rolls,” she said, and a short time later, we were sitting outside a shack near the water digging into a couple of them. It’s been more than fifteen years since that day, but the memory of those clams rolls has my mouth watering and stomach rumbling in anticipation of something too far away to procure.

Another legendary guilty pleasure, one that has been lost to history, was the Little Tavern “Slider,” a small hamburger that was best bought a dozen at a time. “Buy ‘em by the bag…” their signs proclaimed and yes, we did. For me, the place to grab a bag of sliders was the Little Tavern in Georgetown. In mid1980′s in the wee hours of the morning, after clubbing or before hopping to another club, we’d head up Wisconsin Avenue to the familiar little chateau-styled building clad in green and white tile. The preferred way to eat sliders was with mustard — somehow, ketchup never tasted right on them. Founded in 1927, Little Taverns were a familiar sight all over the DC / Baltimore area, with around 70 shops at their peak. But their numbers declined at the end of the century; they limped along for another decade or so, until the last Little Tavern closed in 2008.

The delights from these food emporiums aren’t the sort of meals you serve up on a first date, nor are they the sort of places you eat at every day (unless you have a very good cardiologist). They’re guilty pleasures to be savored, food shared amongst trusted friends and select initiates in a ritual of indiscretion and indulgence; saying “let’s go grab a bag of sliders” is much the same as saying “let’s be bad” with a devilish glint in your eye.

Customer samples "kaki fry" or fried oysters at a fish shop in Tokyo

Every culture has food like this. In Japan, there’s ramen, of course, considered by many to be the quintessential Japanese fast food. Ramen, while universally inexpensive, can vary widely in its quality. Avoiding mediocre ramen is key—the reward for finding a good bowl is a meal that is sublime. It’s worth the effort.

N.B.: Be forewarned that you should never mention “ramen noodles,” the plastic-wrapped staple of college kids in discussions of “ramen” (occasionally Romanized as “lamen”) as you will be branded a fool. As the Oshima Ramen chain of shops proclaim, “Ramen is a gift from God.” They may be saying that with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but it’s best to play it safe and just agree.

If you see a line of more than a couple of people waiting to get in to a ramen shop in Tokyo, you might as well cancel your plans and join the queue, because it’s likely to be an amazing experience. “Ramen Jiro” in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho district is a place like this, where for under ten dollars, you get a legendarily huge bowl, but true ramen connoisseurs will scoff, saying that Ramen Jiro’s main appeal is the immense size of the portions, not the quality of the ramen. Listing the top ramen-ya (ramen shops) here would likely invite an un-winnable battle of opinions, so I’ll refrain from trying, but they’re easy to find—either look for the queue, or ask a trusted friend.

Then there’s Okonomiyaki, a kind of savory pancake, rich with varied ingredients and topped with seaweed flakes, dried bonito, Kewpie mayonnaise and/or a thick brown sweet sauce akin to A1 steak sauce. Monjyayaki is a thinner variant, said to originate not far from Tsukiji’s famous fish market, best had in the little shops of Tsukushima, where each table is equipped with a griddle from which it’s directly eaten with little metal scrapers.

Takoyaki is a similar batter, but made into spheres on a special griddle, each with a piece or two of tough octopus meat. It’s best had when bought at a roadside stand or summer festival, especially when prepared by the sort of guy you would not want to meet in a dark alley. “The secret ingredient to good takoyaki is fear,” a friend is fond of saying.

To be honest, though, it’s hard to feel the same level of guilt eating this sort of food in Japan, as on the whole, the dishes are fresh, the ingredients are the same as you might buy for your own kitchen and, well, it’s Japanese and as a people, they just seem so healthy. Not so in other places:

First of all I’d like to state that, as a French man, there is no such thing as junk food in my diet (at least that I’d confess if no torture is involved). There is plenty of junk food to be found in the streets of Copenhagen; as everywhere else in the world we get our share of McDonald and that sort of things. In certain areas of the city the shawarma is ruling as the King of Junk, in other places it is called kebab but it is basically the same thing. And there is the pølsevogn (literally “sausage wagon”) which is the local version of the hot-dog stand so dear to the heart of new-yorkers. A complete sociological study would be necessary to understand that thing, what with old guys blocking traffic while going from wherever those mighty beasts sleep to the spot where they’ll deliver the greasy goods to customers of all ages… And the fact that they sell French hot-dog is not enough to have me try it!

A customer gluttonying down a sausage at a pølsevogn in the deep winter of Copenhagen...

So I don’t like, let alone love, junk food. So why then contribute?
Because there is that thing called smørrebrød which has a weird status around here. One can find smørrebrød in many variations but also in many caste, matter of speaking. There are smørrebrød of the junk kind, of the home made kind (of course) and of the gourmet kind, found in restaurants. Many Danes eat smørrebrød everyday for lunch, either they bring it in a little lunch box or they buy it from a smørrebrød-to-go shop. It is a common sight to see people in the streets with white little boxes around lunchtime. Although, it beats me how they can eat them properly as it becomes quite rapidly a mess as there is nothing to top them. The exact same concept can be found in restaurants, specialized restaurants of high standards. And that is why I found it fascinating, it would be like having three stars restaurants making hot-dogs.

Lunch box, the Danish style.

Technically it is an “open-ended sandwich”, meaning a sandwich with only one piece of bread. Smøre means butter, brod means bread. So that’s what you get, bread of the dark/black kind (more a compaction of cereals if you ask me), butter and then stuff on top, a lot of stuff. You have from one up to three items piled up on top of that ridiculously small piece of bread. Usually one major and two minors. Major can be fried fish, liver paste, ham, eggs, etc. Minor is usually some kind of vegetable in various state of conditioning: coleslaw salad, beetroot, cucumber, you name it… Then a sauce of some sort: mayonnaise, etc. and sometimes an additional topping: fried bacon, crumbles of bread, fried onions, shrimps and what have you. I have always suspected that a very strict code was ruling this as a state affair, the Danes being quite close to traditionalists. Surely one cannot mix some of the major with some of the minors as one pleases. I remember the first time I went to the cantina of the university where I work. One cantina was for everybody (mainly students) and the other one was for staff. In the first one smørebrod were aligned and prepared beforehand for one to shovel in one’s plate whereas in the latter one had to make them oneself being presented with a buffet of many ingredients. For at least one year I didn’t dare doing it, picturing myself trying to go through the cashier toll. I was sweating profusely imagining the girl in the white outfit looking at me sadly and doing a shy negative sign of the head, sending me back to the buffet for the choice of a bad combination of ingredients.

Smørrebrød(s) lined up and ready to be consumed.

A regular customer shovelling his prey to his plate at lunch break.

But all in all, at the end of it, what they do love here is their café cold-feet as they say: the dreaded “pølsevogn”…

(by Nathalie Farigu / Magnesium)

Snacking is not a modern phenomenon. As a matter of fact, for centuries people have satisfied their cravings for sugar, fat and cholesterol with little in between meals. When the snack attack struck the ancient Romans, they would rush to the thermopolium, which was a little shop selling warm wine and the ancient equivalent of what we now know as fast food. And apparently, the author Pliny was a big fan of eggs marinated in vinegar, which were subsequently deep fried. Other Roman snacks included boiled eggs with pine nut sauce, and libum, a sweet cheesecake.

Those dishes seem to require an awful lot of preparation. Luckily,  the Dutch alternative only requires a Euro or two and a visit to the automatiek, a special kind of vending machine. An almost exclusively Dutch phenomenon, it’s made up of rows of little heated boxes designed to keep the delicacies warm. Behind little glass doors you’ll find enough fat and cholesterol to eat your heart out, literally. Word is that the automatiek originated in Germany at the beginning of  the 20th century. However, its popularity waned after the sixties and the automatiek disappeared everywhere but the Netherlands, where it remains popular til this day.

One of the most popular items you’ll find at the automatiek is the kroket, which is a meat (mostly beef) ragout covered in breadcrumbs, then deep fried beyond recognition. Though it might not win any prizes for looks, it sure does for taste. Especially on a cold winter day, it’s very comforting to bite into a freshly deep fried kroket, perfectly crunchy on the outside, hot, gooey and salty on the inside. It’s the perfect snack in between meals, or after a night of debauchery and libations on the town.

When asked what food they’d miss the most while abroad, the majority of the Dutch population will tell you it’s the kroket. Luckily, the Dutch kroket has found its way onto a few menus of restaurants abroad as well. I found, and consequently enjoyed a kroket in places such as Lovina, Bali and Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. You just don’t get to pull it from the ‘muur’ (Dutch word for ‘wall’).

The kroket isn’t exactly a Dutch invention. It originated in France and can be found in many countries all over the world with a filling of cheese, shrimp, potatoes and/or vegetables. However, the beef kroket is a typically Dutch snack.

Most automatieken are not stand-alone walls of greasy goodness, there’s usually a counter available where you can order drinks and French fries called ‘patat’, which are often served with mayonnaise (‘patat met’). Other popular choices are ‘patat speciaal’ which are fries served with mayo, ketchup and raw onions, or the extremely delicious ‘patatje oorlog’ (war-style French fries) which will make your cholesterol levels soar beyond your wildest dreams and your fat cells scream with orgasmic delight, with its serving of mayo and fatty peanut sauce.

So, what kind of people commit these dietary crimes? According to a recent survey 75% of the Dutch population admits to eating a kroket every once in a while. I bet the other 25% hasn’t come out of the kroket closet yet.

I know that I, as a ‘vegetarian’, whenever I’m in Holland enjoy a ‘vette bek’ (which translates into ‘a greasy mouth’) on a regular basis. As my sister said: ‘It’s oh so bad, but so so good.’

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