2The heartbreaking story of an old man and his cat
When Akiko DuPont’s grandfather, Jiji, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, his smile progressively disappeared as he shut himself from the world. That’s when Kinako, the cat, entered his life, said DuPont, a freelance photographer based in Tokyo and London. “One day, Jiji wandered into my room and found the cat. His eyes shined with happiness.”
Jiji fought in World War II and trained to become a kamikaze fighter. He was supposed to take flight on Aug. 15, 1945. That day instead, Japan, reeling from two atomic attacks, surrendered. After that, Jiji commuted every day to put bread on the table for his family, back and forth to the office for more than 60 years until he retired. “He was a very organized person and for as long as I can remember he scrapbooked articles in newspapers as his hobby,” DuPont said.
Kinako is a “scaredy-cat,” as DuPont called it: a loving but very shy cat. “He loved interrupting or trying to get Jiji’s attention when he was on his newspaper clipping missions,” she said.
3Finding Solitude and Wilderness in the Canadian Yukon
Ever since Swiss photographer Bruno Augsburger discovered the Canadian Yukon Territory in 2000, he’s made it his goal to spend as much time there as possible. Augsburger will spend weeks alone in the wilderness, relying on bushcraft skills to survive. His new book, Out There, is a visual collection of those solo months as he travels through the often untouched Yukon.
4HOW STREET PHOTOGRAPHERS GOT TRAPPED IN AN EVER NARROWING PARADIGM
They called the 50s and 60s the golden era for street photography, yet the average person didn’t know what a street photograph was. Even the photographers themselves were somewhat unsure how to define such a thing other than by taking photographs. Many didn’t even know the term. Bresson’s Decisive Moment was certainly a catalyst for many early street shooters not only for the life energy and geometry captured in the same frame but the idea that you could take photographs of the world around us without a tight preconceived photo journalistic narrative. These were pictures of fundamental significance, not about specific events or places but about the ‘bigger picture’ of life itself.
All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite unlike the light that comes from the sun, or even from ambient illumination. It explodes, suddenly, into darkness.
The history of flash goes right back to the challenges faced by early photographers who wanted to use their cameras in places where there was insufficient light — indoors, at night, in caves. The first flash photograph was probably a daguerreotype of a fossil, taken in 1839 by burning limelight. For the next 50 years, photographers experimented with limelight, which was familiar from theatre illumination, with portable battery-driven lights — which Nadar used in his well-known photos of the Paris catacombs — and with magnesium. Magnesium was available in pulverised form and blown through a flame, or ignited in lengths of wire, or mixed into various unstable, if brightly explosive compounds.
6A Photographer’s Mission to Capture a New Image of Africa
Photography has a unique way of changing perceptions of a place, simply by presenting images that we’ve never seen before. It is exactly this characteristic that motivates Mutua Matheka’s work. Africa is often depicted as a continent plagued by war, disease and famine. So the Kenyan photographer set out to explore and capture his country (and Africa in general) from new heights—literally. Recently, Matheka completed a project in which he climbed multiple communication masts, some as high as 300 feet tall, in an effort to photograph Africa from a rarely seen perspective. With this project and his ongoing work, he hopes to expand the world’s understanding of Africa.
