KIZUNA

Gabrielle Ching (GC), Kizuna Archive Team, interview with Marc PoKempner (MP), Photographer

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GC: How did you get involved with the Kizuna project? 

 

MP: Through Yoko. I was following the news about the disaster in Japan. It seemed far away and there was nothing much I could do. I was glad that Yoko asked me to make some portraits that went with the project. It was through her that I got involved.

 

GC: Did she ask you to do photography right away or if you could help in other ways?

 

MP: Just photographs.

 

GC: You said you had been following the news with this Japan disaster. How was your understanding of the 311 earthquake and everything that happened afterwards?

 

MP: I was happy to be involved and have some way of contributing to people’s understanding about the disaster, and the project. I am a photographer, and Yoko and I have been on several assignments together. I was friends with her husband, who was a wonderful photographer also. I knew her through her music and then I ran into her when I was on assignment and she was covering band stories for Nikkei. Her husband was less and less able to work as his sickness progressed, so she asked me to do some assignments with her and to do photography for this project. My involvement was photography with these Americans who spent time there. We’re very moved by their experience and contribution to whatever they could do to help people in those circumstances. 

 

GC: How did you get in touch with the Americans who had been in Japan?

 

MP: These people were specifically the ones that I was put in touch with (by Yoko). As far as I remember, it was two individuals. One was a marine and the other one was an educator. I spoke briefly with them when we were photographing. Yoko wrote the captions for the photographs. These guys were really affected, moved, and changed by their participation in the relief for the disaster. 

 

GC: Emotion-wise, how was it like to take these photos for the Kizuna project?

 

MP: As a photographer, I very much enjoyed hearing the stories and being in contact with the people. And I tried to understand the particular reason I was photographing them. We talked about their experiences at that time six years ago. It was clear they were very moved and proud to have been involved and contributed.

 

GC: After you took these photographs, did your understanding of the project or the disaster change? Or did you notice something else that you didn’t notice before?

 

MP: It is always good to talk to someone who was actually on the scene. You have a human connection with them and you feel something of what they felt. Their pride of being able to make contributions. 

 

GC: Do you have a favorite photo out of the ones you took for this project? And why is that? 

 

MP: The ones that were published. I did portraits of each of them. I probably did two or three different ideas. The marine I photographed in a very formal way: uniforms in front of the American flag. That seems to be what he wanted and comfortable with. I worked on the lighting and his pose a little bit. I made a few on a tripod. It was a matter of catching him off guard. The second one was the educator. His students created an artwork of a globe. I wanted to photograph him next to that. It has strings connecting the places that participated in relief for the disaster. It was a very charming artwork. Again, it was a question of finding the right angle on the artwork and how to place him next to it. We worked with that for a while, and adjusted the lighting and so forth. By this time I was shooting everything on digital so I was seeing the photographs as I shot them. Again, the ones that were published are my favourites. It wasn’t a situation when I went to a disaster site and photographed all day. It’s a portrait, and you pick one out of the twenty you shoot. 

 

GC: What is something from experience that has stuck with you till today? 

 

MP: What is stuck with me is how it stuck with the subjects: how they were proud and engaged in this life-changing event. I don’t know if it’s such a life-changing event for them, but they were involved. It was clearly overwhelmingly powerful for them. It gave me a taste of how these Americans in Chicago participated. I was glad to help out in the way I did. 

 

GC: This is our last yearly Kizuna project. How do you recommend or imagine the future commemoration of 3/11 should go?

 

MP: I think that some way of preserving those original materials. The project has generated incredible images and that need to be preserved and put in a place where they can be accessible. And people in Chicago and America know that it's accessible online. I think that for people not to forget what happened is very important. Of course, that's the role of photography in general. For people to remember what happened and try not to let it happen again. There's a new push now to rehabilitate the reputation of nuclear power. I think that progress is constantly being made, and that the precautions are improving. There's a whole new generation of nuclear power plants that are less susceptible to this or any kind of disaster. And maybe that will prove to be a useful contribution to the world's energy needs. But it certainly needs to be understood that progress without adequate precautions can have disastrous consequences. So, anything we can do to slow down progress. Capitalism drives progress in a good way, but it also drives it in a way that can be very dangerous for people. That's sort of the take away in general.  

  

GC: Since we are doing a digital archive of photos, as a photographer who participated in this project, what's the thing that you most want to see in our archive? 

 

MP: That's a good question. It seems to me that the most useful things are on the scene photographs from the disaster itself, people's stories about it. We live in an age where you can access this original material. 

 

I came down to New Orleans after Katrina. Katrina happened at the end of August. I came down in February. That was the first time I came back, and I was coming to New Orleans seven years, four years in August. New Orleans was a disaster for four years after Katrina, and there was no nuclear power plant. It was just a flood and windstorm. Cars were piled up under the expressways, and people were homeless. People’s homes were uninhabitable because of the pollution. And this is not nuclear pollution. This is just the sea and river water and the things we live with every day. I live in the Lower Ninth Ward right now. Houses were washed away and gone. They're just now rebuilding some of those areas. There's no grocery store in my neighborhood that I can walk to. The roads are always in terrible shape. Six inches under the roads, there's water. It’s not snow and ice that they have to worry about here, but it's built on mush. So, everything is constantly endangered and threatened. In much the same way as we were talking about before, the energy companies in New Orleans have cut paths through the swampland that line the coast and provided a buffer for the storms. When the storms hit the coast, they hit this soggy, massive swamp and it slowed them down. They didn't have tidal waves and surges that would overwhelm the land because there was a mile of spongy swampland. The oil companies, in order to get to their Gulf drilling stations, they cut channels through this stuff. When they cut channels through it, it floats away. Then there's no protection for the coast anymore. And the whole coast is vulnerable now because all of these areas are not only the rising sea levels, but they're unprotected by the swamps that they used to protect them. So there's ecological problems all over the world that are caused by this concern about the long range implications of the actions in many cases of the oil or energy companies. We're just now coming to terms with this. 10 years ago nobody talked about global warming. Maybe a few scientists here and there, but nobody else thought about it.

 

GC: Is there anything else you want to mention that you think is important that we haven't asked yet, or do we have any additional comments on this? 

 

MP: I think we've covered it. We've talked about the way in which these projects can help keep people's consciousness and the fact that we have to look at long term issues and not just short-term stopgap measures. We have to be careful in planning and remember from generation to generation what and why this has happened. We have to take adequate care to make sure that we're making the right decisions for the long term.