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.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
RSS