Clive Arrowsmith snaps pictures of film directors Cheng Wen-tang (鄭文堂) and Wu Mi-sen (吳米森) standing in the middle of a Taipei photo studio forming a “T” with their hands. The shutter on the high-end Hasselblad camera clicks with each shot, the captured images showing up instantly on a large computer monitor in the corner of the room.
The renowned London-based fashion photographer spent a week in Taiwan in May to take pictures for a Free Tibet awareness campaign organized by Guts United, Taiwan, which culminates with a concert today in Taipei. Arrowsmith was also the photographer for the “T for Tibet” campaign during last year’s Summer Olympics
“To have Clive ... be the official photographer of all the campaign ... it means a lot,” says the organizer of Free Tibet, Freddy Lim (林昶佐), also the front man of the death metal band, Chthonic (閃靈). Having the same photographer for both, Lim says, links the drive for Tibetan freedom in Taiwan with the larger global effort.
Some of the other celebrities photographed by Arrowsmith for Free Tibet are singer-actress Enno Cheng (鄭宜農), writer Wu Yin-ning (吳音寧), SET-TV news chief editor and anchor Chen Ya-lin (陳雅琳), folk singer Panai (巴奈), and Chthonic, Aphasia (阿飛西雅), Kook (庫克), LTK Commune (濁水溪公社) and FireEx (滅火器).
Arrowsmith’s photos for the campaign have since been posted around Taipei, with a large Free Tibet poster featuring Lim and his bandmate and wife Doris Yeh (葉湘怡) displayed at the Vieshow Cinema Square in Xinyi. The images have been broadcast on platform monitors at Taipei’s MRT stations.
Arrowsmith is one of the few photographers who take portraits of the Dalai Lama in an official capacity. He’s also taken portraits of countless other celebrities over the past three decades. A longtime photographer for British Vogue magazine, he shot the Pirelli calendars for 1991 and 1992. A quick flip through a draft of his soon-to-be published book is like going through a who’s who of the entertainment world.
Just a sampling shows actors Michael
Caine and Helena Bonham Carter, musicians George Harrison and David Bowie, writers Hunter S. Thompson and Roald Dahl, naturalist David Attenborough and cooking show host Nigella Lawson.
Behind each of the photographs, Arrowsmith has a story to tell that illuminates the lives and personalities of his subjects.
He detailed the time he was commissioned to snap Prince Charles for his 50th birthday. Arrowsmith remembers putting on a lot of cologne because he was very nervous, causing Prince Charles to say to him, “That cologne you’re wearing ... isn’t it what old Italian playboys wear?” He said they had a laugh over that.
And the time he took a portrait of a smiling Yoko Ono in London. Arrowsmith said when he first started shooting she was just standing still. To loosen her up, he asked her to sing a song. She started singing The Beatles’ When I’m Sixty-Four because, she told him, she turned 64 that year.
Or the time he took a photo of Liv Tyler wearing a diamond necklace for DeBeers. Arrowsmith says the company paid her in diamonds for the shoot.
Arrowsmith counts many of his celebrity subjects as his friends. He regularly plays guitar with Richard Gere and Paul McCartney calls him “Spike.”
At the photo shoot in Taipei, it’s clear Arrowsmith is efficient. He doesn’t take long with each subject. Arrowsmith says it’s all about capturing a moment when the picture, the person and the camera all gel together. He says it’s also about trying to put the subject at ease because if a photographer imposes his or her will on someone, “you can see the stress in their face.”
And when asked what difference photographs make, Arrowsmith, a practicing Buddhist, gets passionate. He says he got a friend to sneak some of his photographs of the Dalai Lama into Tibet to distribute to monks and the photos are treasured. “Absolutely photographs make a difference in peoples lives,” he said.
For more information about today’s The 50th Spring: Tibetan Freedom Concert (西藏自由音樂會) in Taipei, visit the Web site www.freetibet.tw.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS