Tag:The Globe and Mail

Undercover in North Korea – New on YouTube

In 2009, I travelled to North Korea on assignment for the Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail. I travelled with G&M correspondent, Mark Mackinnon, secretly posing as tourists, in order to get a rare and unique view of the country at a time when very few outsiders were permitted to visit. Breaking up my camera and smuggling it in pieces in my luggage, I was able to surreptitiously take photos and use a tourist’s camcorder to capture video as we […]

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Author of The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung, for the Globe & Mail

Last week I had the opportunity to photograph the Hong Kong author, Chan Koonchung, who has recently sprung to the attention of the international community as a result of the publication of his book, The Fat Years. The Fat Years paints a dystopian picture of China, dissecting the political workings of the country and its implications on the pysche of modern Chinese. I’ve included  a couple of images from the shoot, one of which was used online to accompany the […]

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Starving North Korea Welcomes Kim Jong-Il’s Birthday

“Starving North Korea Send out SOS for Food Aid” is one of the headlines that reads on the Daily Telegraph’s website this week. This week also marks the birthday of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il. I have chosen to mark this day with a video that was released a few months ago on the Telegraph website, secretly recorded by North Koreans dissidents, in attempt to show some of the frightening conditions in the country. It’s disturbing to watch. As […]

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Korean Reflections | Images Across A Divide

View gallery in full size As anyone who has been watching the news in the past 24 hours will know, tensions on the Korean peninsula have been increasing very very quickly following the shelling of a small South Korean island, by the north Koreans yesterday. Tensions are nothing new, however after yesterday’s events it seems like attention is focused on the conflict more now than in many previous years. This seemed like a good time to release a short series […]

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zen garden

North Korea and the World Cup – As Ever, an Unknown Quantity

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 […]

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YouTube Channel

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. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN4gKiD9JyY[/youtube] I currently have 5 entries on the channel; ‘Inside North Korea Parts 1, 2 and 3’, ‘China’s Growing […]

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Video | China’s 60th Anniversary Preparations in Hangzhou

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyj0NiOSnko[/youtube] 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. One of the highlights of the video process was meeting and filming the author Yu Hua. Originating from Hangzhou, Yu Hua is […]

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Front Page of the Globe and Mail – 1st October 2009

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 […]

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On Assignment | China Celebrates its 60th Birthday | Globe and Mail

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 […]

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Inside North Korea | Video #3 | On the North Korea/China border

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxSifGgJsbs[/youtube] 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 […]

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