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(Photo by Kwon Choul; borrowed from The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan webpage)From Japan Today, 1/29/09:
Perhaps this need to empathize with the underprivileged may help boost sales of the recently released photo collection “Kabukicho no Kokoro-chan” (Kodansha, 1,500 yen).
According to Shukan Gendai (Feb 7), Kwon Chol, a 42-year-old Korean photojournalist, has chronicled the mean streets of Kabukicho for the past 12 years. Kwon’s newest work introduces touching scenes of a homeless 4-year-old girl he first encountered there in September, 2007.
“What’s your name?” he asked her. “Kokoro!” she replied, holding up four small fingers to indicate her age and grinning to reveal badly stained teeth.
Her parents, from a nearby prefecture, had moved to Tokyo, where they shifted from job to job, and eventually wound up living on the streets of Shinjuku.
Apparently from age three onward, Kokoro was left to wander around Kabukicho on her own, waiting for her mother to return from work. According to Kwon, other homeless fed her—items such as hamburgers with expired consume-by dates and ice cream—and she adapted naturally to her surroundings.
“Her living room was a game arcade,” he’s quoted. “Her toilet was the toilet in the arcade. She’d walk around the plaza in front of Koma Theater in her bare feet. Maybe she regarded it the way other kids think of their own backyards.”
Kwon tells Shukan Gendai he became emotionally involved in the child’s well being, helping her father to find a job and assisting the family in the search for affordable housing. But at the same time he couldn’t resist snapping photos of Kokoro-chan, padding about the entertainment district in a tiny hooded sweatshirt, carrying discarded cardboard boxes and sleeping on the sidewalk.
Read the whole story:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/kabukicho-street-child-subject-of-new-photo-book
I am assuming that Kwon Choul got permission from the child's parents to photograph her and publish his work. This is a strict and necessary rule in any set of guidelines or ethical standards.
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(Photo by Kwon Choul; borrowed from The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan webpage)
he became emotionally involved in the child’s well being, helping her father to find a job and assisting the family in the search for affordable housing.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think his reaction as a human being was admirable, if you want to criticize his ethics as a photojournalist or anthropologist, this passage right here is the damning one.