Wednesday 27 August 2014

Nagasaki

So I'd vowed to check out both Nagasaki and Hiroshima during my stay in Japan.  This Summer I managed to finish my pilgrimage - heading to Nagasaki by train.

It's a long, long way from Tokyo to Nagasaki.  It took the best part of 9 hours on bullet and express trains meaning it's probably in the order of a thousand kilometres between the two cities.  Japan may only have the inhabitable land space of the U.K. but it's almost as long as america is tall.

I took a fair number of pictures during the trip, but truth be told very few were up to scratch.  Whenever I go outside with my camera I set myself some challenges; this time it was to take as few pictures as possible, to try and get a 'keeper,' on the first attempt at each subject.  I didn't always stick to this plan, but it turned out to be quite thought provoking.  For the first time ever I have an album where each picture tends to be entirely different from the last and this is something of a novelty for me.  As always, it was my intention to walk away from a days shoot with one single picture that, when looked at in 60 years time, will remind me of the day and fill me with pride at having taken it.  It's always been my intention to have enough quality pictures to one day fill a book, and taking the slow and steady approach is about the only way I can think of achieving this goal.

You can judge whether I've succeeded in that aim.


I'll start off with the tackiest picture imaginable.  Aside from the scene in Schindlers list that has become infamous, black and white with a single source of colour rarely affects people in the way the creator intends.  Maybe they've become so common that no one cares anymore.  Maybe, like the tilted angle photograph of the 90's, it's a fashion that was never going to live beyond the inaugural years of photoshop.


So this was an interesting picture to edit.  At first I darkened both the sky and the trees somewhat - the intention was to highlight the woman (due to the angle of the picture, mostly ignoring the child she is carrying) at the expense of everything else.  It looked okay, but it lacked any kind of interest beyond the statue.  The sky was interesting enough (see: had clouds) that I felt the light (sky)/dark (trees)/light (statue) scheme worked to the point of acceptability.  Making her stand out without distorting the entire picture was the challenge, and I don't really know if I've succeeded in that endeavour.


With a portrait format the focus shifts away from encompassing the setting to settle on the figure.  I found the woman a much more interesting subject (literally everyone else was taking pictures of the child with the woman as an incidental point of focus) than the child.  It is her saving the child, but it is her generation, her peers that caused the child suffering in the first place.

At this point it is worth pointing out that the artist intended the woman to represent some kind of peaceful deity.  Knowing god and or gods are a lie, I see her as the embodiment of peaceful thoughts or actions within humanity.  She is not a child, so doesn't hold the innocence of the child and as such, is as culpable as the rest of us for the actions of our equals.  The somber look on her face isn't so much sadness at the loss of that child, or the actions of that time - it's the inescapable truth that humanity is destined to continue doing this over and over again.

As such, I find her expression much more revealing than the body of the child is saddening.


This is the last pillar standing at the church in Nagasaki.  Much like the dome in Hiroshima it stands as a monument to the devastation of war and much like the dome in Hiroshima, it stands as a symbol of hope.


This guy is symbolic of peace versus war.  One of his arms represents war, the other peace.  When I heard which was which, I couldn't reconcile the idea of why each one was as it was, so I could never commit to memory which arm symbolised what.


This is probably my favourite picture.  You could absolutely miss the pidgeon sitting on her arm, but the expression in the statue alone makes it worthwhile.  Much like the ruminations about the woman above, I couldn't decide how to edit this picture in post.  In the end I went much the same route, but this time trying to get the viewer to look at her face as much as possible before looking at the other details in the picture.

To be honest I don't think any of these are worthy of more than a couple of seconds of perusal but you never know.  Everyone has different tastes after all.

I'll hopefully be adding a number of blog posts in the coming days with (fingers crossed) a lot of pictures to accompany.

If you haven't already seen the videos of the festival and my thirty second montage of Japan this Summer, check out the posts prior to this one.

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