VISUAL THOUGHTS 视觉观点

Men watching the World Cup match between North Korea and Brazil in a bar in Seoul. 2010

It was about 2:00 a.m. as my taxi careered down the highway that leads from Incheon airport to downtown Seoul. Having just landed in the middle of a lightning storm, the rain was battering the taxi windshield and the GPS on the driver’s dashboard blinked indicating a breaking of the local speed limit. I was starting to wonder if it was really that essential that I make it to my 3:30 a.m. appointment on time.

That appointment was to watch and photograph the World Cup game between Brazil and North Korea. An odd appointment to be trying to keep you may think, especially for an Englishman based in Beijing. This however was the first part of a shoot I was assigned to for the Canadian newspaper the Globe & Mail which involved spending last week in South Korea.

Globe & Mail Website Screenshot

As many readers of this blog will know, last year I travelled undercover with the Globe & Mail’s Mark MacKinnon into North Korea to report on this isolated nation. During a fascinating 5 day trip I witnessed a country of such uniqueness, that I am quite confident I will never see anything quite like it again. This time however, I was heading south of the DMZ to try to gauge the reactions of locals in Seoul to the arrival of the neighbour on the World Cup scene.

In the build up to the game, nobody really knew anything about this team. Some people mocked them, expecting Brazil to embarrass the lowest-ranked team in the competition. Most people drew a blank when asked about them, in a similar way as if you asked them about the country in general.

read more »

YouTube

I haven’t announced this officially but I now have a YouTube channel! As I have started to produce more video work and multimedia over the past few months, I obviously want to get this work out to as many people as possible and YouTube seems to be the perfect venue as it is possible to upload multimedia content, even without video.

I currently have 5 entries on the channel; ‘Inside North Korea Parts 1, 2 and 3′, ‘China’s Growing Sands’ for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ‘China’s 60th Anniversary Preparation in Hangzhou’, for the Globe and Mail. By far the most popular video so far has been Part 1 of Inside North Korea which has nearly 1,000 views. A modest amount.

I have embedded a couple of the videos here on this blog entry but please go to the channel here to subscribe and have a look at some of the videos and spread the word to others who you feel may be interested in the work I am doing.

The Digitial Journalist

In case you missed it earlier this week, the Digital Journalist published a dispatch of mine in their October 2009 edition. The dispatch is titled “Inside North Korea” and recounts some of the experience that I had when I was shooting in North Korea. You can read the dispatch on their website here, or just scroll down to read the text below.

This isn’t the first time I have contributed dispatches to the Digital Journalist, having two other dispatches published for them in the past year. The first was published in December 2008, on the subject of homeless communities in Mongolia. You can view that story here. The second story on “Abandoned Cities” was published in June 2009, as part of my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting earlier this year. To read that dispatch, please go here.

——————————————————————————————————————

Last month, I got a call from the Globe & Mail’s Asia correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, asking me if I was free in early September for a shoot. “Sure,” I said. I had been working with Mark a lot recently and was keen to work with him again. “I’m thinking of going to North Korea,” he said. “North Korea? Okay, I’m in,” I nonchalantly replied.

As our bus trundled across the bridge over the Yalu River that separates China and North Korea, my initial nonchalance had well and truly disappeared as we slowly approached the most closed nation on earth.

read more »

The above video is one that I produced for the Globe and Mail newspaper, along with the Asia Bureau Chief Mark Mackinnon and his assistant Yu Mei, a couple of weeks ago. The video centers on the preparations for the country’s 60th anniversary that passed on October 1st, focusing on the city of Hangzhou which lies to the west of Shanghai.

Yu Hua

One of the highlights of the video process was meeting and filming the author Yu Hua. Originating from Hangzhou, Yu Hua is one of China’s most famous and controversial novelists. In 1992 he released the book ‘To Live’ which was adapted into a movie by the well-known Chinese director Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li. His feelings (and that of others we interviewed) about the way China has developed over the past 60 years were particularly interesting and refreshing, especially considering the propagandistic view presented constantly here in China recently.

Needless to say, witnessing the change China is going through at the moment is a special experience. Hearing the voices of people who have witnessed this change first-hand over the past 60 years is even more special and constantly eye-opening. I hope you enjoy the video.

My Image on the front page of Canada's national newspaper yesterday.

I got a surprise yesterday evening when I got a text from a colleague telling me that one of my photos had run on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been contributing the visuals from China quite a lot to the Globe and Mail recently. They are a great team to work with and I was delighted to see that they had decided to run my photo of Mao Zedong’s personal photographer Hou Bo, taken at her home in Beijing, as part of the coverage of China’s 60th birthday.

If you missed my last post about this assignment and meeting this remarkable photographer, please head here to read it.

Hangzhou. Flags fly in the city. 2009

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Here in Beijing, Tiananmen Square has become awash with parades, both military and civilian, as the populace celebrates Mao Zedong’s founding declaration, exactly 60 years ago here in China’s capital.

The build up to this event has been quite something. Beijing has come to a standstill at regular intervals over the past couple of weeks as dry-runs of today’s celebrations have taken place. Tanks have once again graced the streets of Beijing, fighter jets have zipped above the city and and army of yellow-shirted volunteers have descended on every street corner throughout the city.

In the build-up to this anniversary, I have been on assignment for Canada’s Globe and Mail, covering various facets of the country’s preparations and photographing various people who have a close connection to what the country has gone through in the last 60 years.

read more »

This is the third and final installment of mine and Mark MacKinnon’s short videos from our trip in North Korea.

This third video focuses on the Chinese city of Dandong, which lies on the North Korea/China border and offers a startling contrast between the two sides of the Yalu river. Whilst the city of Dandong thrives, fuelled by the economic boom in many of China’s cities, the North Korean side is devoid of life, except for the odd fishing boat and abandoned building.

I hope you have enjoyed this set of three videos. In case you missed the other two, please find the first one “Inside North Korea” here and the second, “The Arirang Mass Games” here.

The above video is the second short-video by myself and the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon from our assignment in North Korea. The topic of this video is the Arirang Mass Games which are held in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang.

In case you don’t know, the Mass Games are a gymnastics, dance and song spectacular that showcase North Korean history and culture. Using hundreds of participants, mostly schoolchildren, the games are an imposing and impressive sight which symbolise the power of the masses working as one in North Korea.

Apart from the huge overtones of propaganda, the show is actually quite breathtaking. My personal favourite part of the event are the hundreds of schoolchildren who provide the backdrop to the whole spectacle. Holding up books containing pages with different colours, they all open and close the books in unison to create the unbelievable moving backdrop.

If you missed the first video, you can view it here.

NORTH KOREA. A family huddle together in Kaesong city near Panmunjom, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. 2009

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from North Korea. I wanted to post a photo from NK as last week’s POTW but I held off as I was waiting until the Globe & Mail, who commissioned the shoot, published the  images on their website.

Throughout my journey with the G&M’s Mark MacKinnon, we were whizzed across the country from site to site, trapped in our own oversized minivan which could of held about 15 people but was strangely reserved only for us two. We spent a lot of time in this van and it was from this viewpoint that I was able to gain many of my shots from the country, capturing glimpses of normal life between the government approved sites.

This week’s POTW is one of those photos and for me captures a very brief slice of normal North Korean family life, with the subjects completely unaware a picture is being taken. The children huddling in the shade of their mother’s umbrella. The father, crouched nearly out of sight. The other passers-by. This is was one of the hardest pictures to get. A normal picture. An insight. A brief glimpse.

To see more of the pictures from the series, please head to the Globe & Mail’s website here and to view our first of three short videos about North Korea and our trip, please go here.

As some of you may already know, last week I was on assignment in North Korea. Forgive me for not giving a hint of this exciting assignment beforehand, however myself and Mark MacKinnon from Canada’s Globe & Mail, for whom I was working, wanted to try and keep this as quiet as possible until (a) we made it out safely and (b) the work was first published on the G&M website.

Well, we are now back in Beijing and are happy to show the first of three videos shot from the trip. This is the first video I have ever shot, all done on a very touristy camcorder as not to raise suspicions, but I’m very happy with the results, especially considering the conditions we were working under i.e. being watched at all times by our government minders.

Needless to say, this was the most eye-opening photo-assignment and traveling experience I have ever had and possibly the most nerve-wracking. Fresh off the back of the story of Euna Lee and Laura Lin, American journalists who were caught crossing the China-North Korea border, being sentenced to over 10 years in a labour camp and then subsequently being ‘rescued’ by Bill Clinton, Mark and I were obviously a little nervous about heading into the country. Would Bill come and rescue us too if something went wrong?!

I will be posting plenty more about our trip into North Korea, however please sit and enjoy the first installment of videos from the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. To read Mark’s excellent articles and diary entries from the trip please go here and to see more of my images from the trip, please go here. Scroll through day-by-day to see the images from each day in chronological order.

*Update* 09/09/09 To view video #2 “The Arirang Mass Games”, please go here and the view video #3, “On the North Korea/China border”, please go here.