Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City. We're pale, gray creatures. We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight. We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography.
Pre marta 2011. bila sam fotografski retušer u Njujorku. Mi smo bleda, siva stvorenja. Krijemo se u tamnim sobama bez prozora i uglavnom izbegavamo sunce. Od mršavih manekenki pravimo još mršavije, od savršene kože još savršeniju, od nemogućeg moguće. Mediji nas kritikuju sve vreme, ali neki od nas su nadareni umetnici sa godinama iskustva sa stvarnim uvažavanjem slika i fotografija.
On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts. I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks.
11. marta 2011. kao i ceo svet, gledala sam od kuće, tragični razvoj događaja u Japanu. Ubrzo nakon toga, organizacija gde sam dobrovoljac, All Hands Volunteers je bila tamo u roku od nekoliko dana, radeći kao deo spasilačkog odgovora. Ja i još stotinjak dobrovoljaca, znali smo da ne možemo samo da sedimo kod kuće, tako da sam odlučila da im se pridružim naredne tri nedelje.
On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave. The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland. As you can imagine, the town had been devastated.
13. maja sam stigla u grad Ofunato. To je mali ribarski grad u prefekturi Ivate, sa oko 50.000 stanovnika, jedan od prvih koje je talas udario. Zabeleženo je da su vode dostizale visine preko 24 metara i prešle više od 3 km u unutrašnjost kopna. Kao što možete da zamislite, grad je bio opustošen.
We pulled debris from canals and ditches. We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation. We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant. We got dirty, and we loved it.
Izvlačili smo krhotine iz kanala i jaruga. Očistili smo škole. Očistili smo domove od mulja i pripremili za renoviranje i rehabilitaciju. Uklonili smo tone i tone smrdljivih, trulih ribljih leševa iz lokalnog pogona za preradu ribe. Uprljali smo se i svidelo nam se.
For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things. They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards. And everyone was doing the same. They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping.
Nedeljama, podjednako svi dobrovoljci i meštani su nalazili slične stvari. Nalazili su slike i albume slika i kamere i SD kartice. Svi su radili istu stvar. Sakupljali su ih i odnosili ih na razna mesta u okolnim gradovima da bi se čuvali.
Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt. As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, absolutely everything they had, everything had to be left behind.
Sve do ovog trenutka nisam shvatala da su ove fotografije bile tako velik deo ličnih gubitaka koje su ovi ljudi osetili. Kako su bežali od talasa i boreći se za svoje živote, apsolutno sve što su imali, sve su morali ostaviti za sobom.
At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town. I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, the huge giant bathtubs. This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos. This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them.
Na kraju prve nedelje, pomagala sam u evakuacionom centru u gradu. Pomagala sam da se očiste javna topla kupatila (onseni), ogromne džinovske kade. Ovo je takođe bilo mesto u gradu gde je evakuacioni centar skupljao fotografije. Tu su ih ljudi predavali i bila sam počastvovana onog dana kada su mi poverili da im pomognem da ih ručno očiste.
Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened. As I looked through the photos, there were some were over a hundred years old, some still in the envelope from the processing lab, I couldn't help but think as a retoucher that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same. So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go. So we started retouching photos.
Bilo je emocionalno i nadahnjujuće i uvek sam slušala da treba razmišljati van okvira, ali dok zapravo nisam bila van svojih okvira nije se ništa desilo. Dok sam pregledavala fotografije, neke su bile starije više od sto godina, neke još uvek u kovertama od razvijanja, nisam mogla a da ne pomislim da kao retušer mogu da popravim cepanja i ogrebotine i znala sam stotine ljudi koji bi mogli isto. Te noći, posegla sam preko Fejsbuka i pitala njih nekoliko i do jutra odziv je bio toliko ogroman i pozitivan da sam znala da moramo da probamo. Počeli smo da retuširamo fotografije.
This was the very first. Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic as having the photo damaged. (Applause)
Ovo je bila prva. Nije strašno oštećena, ali gde je voda uzrokovala promenu boje na licu devojčice moralo je da se popravi sa velikom preciznošću i delikatnošću. U suprotnom, ta devojčica neće ličiti više na tu devojčicu, to je zasigurno tragično isto kao da je fotografija oštećena. (Aplauz)
Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries. Within two weeks, I had 150 people wanting to join in. Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada. Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos. The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, they could give it to us, have it scanned, uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded by a gaijin, a stranger, somewhere on the other side of the globe, and it'd start being fixed.
Tokom vremena, pristizalo je više fotografija, na sreću, i bilo je potrebno još retušera, tako da sam ponovo posegla preko Fejsbuka i LinkedIna i u roku od pet dana 80 ljudi je htelo da pomogne iz 12 različitih država. U roku od dve nedelje, imala sam 150 ljudi voljnih da pomognu. U Japanu, do jula, proširili smo se do susednog grada Rikuzentakatana severnije do grada zvanoga Jamada. Jednom nedeljno, postavili bismo opremu za skeniranje u privremeno postavljene biblioteke fotografija gde su ljudi dobijali svoje fotografije nazad. Ponekad starije žene nikad dotad nisu videle skenere, ali u roku od 10 minuta kako su našli svoju izgubljenu fotografiju, mogli su nam je dati da se skenira, postavi na "oblak" servere, odakle bi je skinuo neki gajidžin, stranac, negde sa druge strane sveta i počeo da je popravlja.
The time it took, however, to get it back is a completely different story, and it depended obviously on the damage involved. It could take an hour. It could take weeks. It could take months. The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged. It was very time-consuming.
Međutim, vreme potrebno da se fotografija vrati je sasvim drugačija priča i zavisilo je naravno od oštećenja. Moglo je da traje sat. Moglo je trajati nedeljama. Moglo je trajati mesecima. Kimono na ovoj slici je manje-više trebalo da se ručno nacrta ili da se sastavi, birajući ostatke od boja i detalja koje voda nije oštetila. Zahtevalo je mnogo vremena.
Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, dry and reclaimed.
Sve ove fotografije oštetila je voda, bile su u slanoj vodi, punoj bakterija, u kanalizaciji, ponekad i u nafti, sve to vremenom nanosi štetu, ručno čišćenje je bilo veliki deo projekta. Nismo mogli da retuširamo fotografije dok se ne očiste, osuše i preuzmu.
Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. We had an amazing local woman who guided us. It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone. You don't get a chance to mess it up.
Imali smo sreće sa ručnim čišćenjem. Imali smo neverovatnu lokalnu ženu koja nas je vodila. Veoma je lako napraviti još štete na već oštećenim fotografijama. Kao što je moj vođa tima, Vin, jednom rekao, to je kao da radite tetovažu na nekome. Nemate šansu da zabrljate.
The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go. She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage. She also had duplicates. Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix, we could just put them together in one good photo, and remake the whole photo.
Žena koja nam je donela ove fotografije imala je sreće, što se tiče fotografija. Počela je sama da ih ručno čisti i prestala je kada je shvatila da ih još oštećuje. Takođe je imala duplikate. Područja kao njen suprug i njeno lice, koje bi inače bilo nemoguće popraviti, mogli smo da sastavimo u jednu dobru fotografiju i da napravimo celu fotografiju.
When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us. Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood, and they'd recognized him. The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys were both at school, separate schools. One of them got caught up in the water. It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived.
Kada je preuzela fotografije od nas, podelila je delić svoje priče sa nama. Njene fotografije su našle kolege njenog supruga u ruševinama lokalne vatrogasne stanice daleko od mesta gde je nekada bio njihov dom i prepoznali su ga. Na dan cunamija, on je bio zadužen da osigura da su brane od cunamija zatvorene. Morao je da ide ka vodi kada su se oglasile sirene. Njena dva, ne više tako mala dečaka, su bila u odvojenim školama. Jednog od njih je odnela voda. Trebalo joj je nedelju dana da ih nađe i otkrije da su svi preživeli.
The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday. For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed.
Dan kada sam joj predala fotografije je takođe bio 14. rođendan njenog najmlađeg sina. Za nju, uprkos svemu, te fotografije su bile savršen poklon njemu, nešto što je mogao ponovo da gleda, nešto čega se sećao pre nastalih martovskih ožiljaka kada se apsolutno sve u njegovom životu promenilo ili uništilo.
After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — (Applause) — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly. Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched. During this time, we hadn't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, most of which was printer inks.
Nakon šest meseci u Japanu, 1.100 dobrovoljaca je prošlo kroz All Hands, stotine njih nam je pomoglo da ručno očistimo preko 135.000 fotografija. Većina - (Aplauz) - većina se ponovo uspešno vratila domovima, što je najvažnije. Preko 500 dobrovoljaca iz celog sveta je pomoglo da 90 porodica dobije nazad stotine fotografija, potpuno prepravljene i retuširane. Tokom ovog vremena na opremu i materijal nismo potrošili više od hiljadu dolara, od čega je većina bila mastilo za štampač.
We take photos constantly. A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one. They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for. That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back.
Stalno uzimamo fotografije. Fotografija je podsetnik na nekog ili nešto, mesto, vezu, voljenu osobu. One su čuvari naših sećanja i naše prošlosti, poslednje što bismo uzeli i prvo za šta bismo se vratili da tražimo. O tome se radilo u ovom projektu, o obnavljanju malih delova čovečanstva, o vraćanju te veze nekome.
When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it.
Kada se ovakva fotografija nekome vrati u ovom stanju, to čini veliku razliku u životu osobe koja je dobije.
The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin.
Projekat je takođe napravio velike promene u životima retušera. Nekima od njih je dao vezu sa nečim većim, sa mogućnošću da se oduže, koristeći svoj talenat na nečemu drugom osim mršavih modela i savršene kože.
I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months.
Želela bih da završim tako što ću pročitati e-mail koji sam dobila od jedne od njih, Sindi, onog dana kada sam se napokon nakon šest meseci vratila iz Japana.
"As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images. One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall. Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?" Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
"Dok sam radila, nisam mogla da ne mislim na pojedince i priče predstavljene na slikama. Posebno na jednu, fotografiju žena svih godišta, od bake do devojčice, skupljene oko jedne bebe, koja je pogodila žicu, jer slična fotografija moje porodice, moja baka i majka, ja i novorođena kćerka, visi na našem zidu. Širom sveta, kroz vekove, naše opšte potrebe su slične, zar ne?" Hvala. (Aplauz) (Aplauz)