Thirty Years in Asia. Business at Scale. Life at Depth.
Gallery
A record, not a portfolio
Thirty years of carrying a camera through a life in Asia. These aren't a photographer's frames — they're a witness's.
Singapore · Outram Road, 2013 Singapore, 2013. Before the AI era, this caught my own resonance with wabi-sabi. Seen through today’s AI lens, an obscure furniture shop in Singapore had put up the only argument that still holds. — Journey East, Outram Road.Tokyo · the Tower at dusk the hour the city stops pretending to be finishedKyoto · Yasaka Shrine lanterns lit for no one in particular, which is the pointKyoto · Yasaka, over the roofs eight hundred years of not needing to be anywhere elseSingapore · Tanjong Pagar a fishing village, then a dock, then a district; the cranes are only now leavingManila · the last light the sky does the talking; the city goes quiet to listen, brieflyTokyo · Shibuya a thousand people crossing at once, and not one of them touchingTokyo · Shinjuku, at dusk a good and solemn view; one evening the moon rose over the tower and I happened to be looking
Japan
Kyoto · Sanjūsangen-dō, the name-board the name says thirty-three; what it means is: sit down, you're here againKyoto · Sanjūsangen-dō, the iron-bound doors shut, they are a wall; open, the longest room in Japan; I have only ever known them openKyoto · Sanjūsangen-dō the most peaceful place in the world to me, where I go to centre; every five years, without failTokyo · Namiki 667, the wall the wall itself: made entirely of old newspapers harvested from the former Asahi Shimbun offices the bar now occupiesTokyo · Asakusa, at night the temple keeps its own hours; the city behind it never learned toTokyo · Namiki 667, Ginza a bar in what was once the Asahi Shimbun office, small pieces of old newspapers festoon the walls in colored swatches; very cool, and it knows it.Tokyo · Ebisu, October 2021 Opening night at Peter Luger’s first house outside Brooklyn.Tokyo · Ginza 4-chome, from above the clock has kept the same hour since 1932; everything under it has changed twiceKamakura, c. 2000 the first year; the shirt is the only thing I would changeAmazon Japan · the office wall the sign says it all, for an AmazonianHakodate · the wooden corridor a corridor built to be walked slowly, in a country that no longer has the timeKyoto · Heian Shrine, the garden pond the pond does the sky better than the skyTokyo · Marunouchi, the station at night a hundred years old and still the most modern thing in the districtTokyo · the Tower, late dusk the one building in Tokyo that everyone agrees onKyoto · Maruyama Jizo-son, spring dawn the blossom is gone in a week; the little Jizō on the corner keeps watch the other fifty-oneKyoto · Sanjūsangen-dō, an earlier visit thirteen years before the other photograph; the hall has not moved, and neither, it turns out, have ITokyo · Shinjuku, the towers at night the government of a city of fourteen million, lit like it knowsTokyo · the Tower, from Shinagawa Tokyo gives you the Tower a slice at a time, between buildings, and never the whole of itTokyo · the Tower, at night the same tower, every visitor’s photograph, and still worth takingTokyo · the Docomo tower, Skytree beyond two eras of the same idea, a tower to be seen from everywhereTokyo · dinner at home, Azabu-jūban herbs, fish, a blue Hermès plate; a masterpiece, suitably platedTokyo · Atago, the steps eighty-six steps at forty degrees; a Sunday walkabout becomes exercise or penance, and the steps decide whichTokyo · the Tower at dusk the hour the city stops pretending to be finishedKyoto · Yasaka Shrine lanterns lit for no one in particular, which is the pointKyoto · Yasaka, over the roofs eight hundred years of not needing to be anywhere elseTokyo · Shibuya a thousand people crossing at once, and not one of them touchingTokyo · Shinjuku, at dusk a good and solemn view; one evening the moon rose over the tower and I happened to be lookingTokyo · Zōjō-ji, the gate the Sangedatsumon, 1622: pass through and you leave greed, anger and folly behind; the Tower behind it makes no such promiseTokyo · the New York Bar fifty-two floors up; the film made it famous, the trio makes it worth the liftKyoto · Sanjūsangen-dō my place of peace; the hall behind me is a hundred and twenty metres longHakodate · Goryōkaku, the stone the fort Hijikata died defending, 1869; the stone is to Takeda Ayasaburō, who designed itHakodate · the red-brick warehouses built to hold cargo, kept to hold guests as an amazing boutique hotelHakodate · outside the station a tree lit green — heliotropism, after darkYokohama · Minato Mirai, at night the wheel is a clock — built for the 1989 expo, once the largest in the world — keeping time over the port that first kept time for the countryTokyo · Roppongi private lockers, bottle keep, no names; the staff simply "knows"Yokohama · the port, late afternoon the working port, not the pretty one; the cruise ships come for the view and the container ships pay for itTokyo · Ginza 7-chome the most expensive strip of sky in Japan, and nobody looks up at itTokyo · Toranomon Toranomon, my staple for business drinks: the wall glows, the conversation eventually does tooTokyo · Jōshin-ji, Jiyūgaoka, from the gate Kuhonbutsu, in the middle of Jiyūgaoka; the shopping street ends, and three hundred years beginTokyo · Jōshin-ji, the room onto the garden yūgen, naturally cultivated, to allTokyo · the Tower seen here from between two blocks, on Sakurada-dōri up from AkabanebashiNara · Kōfuku-ji the shika are waiting for senbei from meTokyo · Roppongi Hills through the branches we spy residencesTokyo · Jūban Inari, Azabu-jūban I pass by every day, and feel the peace every day by noticingTokyo · the back street from Azabu-jūban to Roppongi bookended by a bookshop and a Starbucks, with more stacked-up cheap bars and restaurants between than you can countYokohama · the harbour, dusk the treaty port, 1859: the first place Japan had to work out how to host a foreigner. From up here it looks like it did well on the tradeTokyo · Nakameguro my second-favourite whisky bar in TokyoTokyo · the Tower, from a window in Shiodome the exit sign in the sky is the window reflection, not the city itselfTokyo · Ginza, Namiki 667 the red wall at the entrance side can bend your mind for minutes on endTokyo · Meiji-dōri the one week Tokyo stops to look upTokyo · Keyakizaka, Roppongi, the winter lights five minutes from home, and I still take the long way; the bakery at the top is the best in the city, which helpsTokyo · back streets near Higashi-Ginza an amazing and unique bonsai, for sale, seen on a walkaboutTokyo · Tennōzu, the canal at night bond warehouses once; now the whole waterfront sits down to dinner and admires its own reflectionTokyo · Sengaku-ji, the gate the forty-seven rōnin lie inside; three hundred years on, people still bring incense for men who kept their wordTokyo · Saikai-ji, under the tower Shiba was the shoguns' temple quarter; in 1958 the Tower went up on ground the temples had held for three centuries, and the small ones simply carried on underneathTokyo · Keyakizaka, the Tower in May same street as the winter lights, six months on; the trees do the illuminating nowTokyo · Omote-sandō, a gate shibui — the beauty of holding back; a gate that says everything by saying nothingTokyo · Omote-sandō lunch under the zelkova can never grow old
Singapore
Singapore · Marina Bay a garden first, a bank second; the lilies were here before the moneySingapore · Tanjong Pagar a fishing village, then a dock, then a district; the cranes are only now leavingSingapore · Potato Head, Keong SaikSingapore · CHIJMES entrance, 2015 a convent, then a hall, then a place to eat; Singapore’s whole method in one buildingSingapore · from the National Gallery roof, dusk two chairs, the Padang, and the skyline that pays for itSingapore · Marina Bay, at night from the roof, the whole plan is visible; that is the point of the roofSingapore · the district, at night every light is somebody still workingSingapore · CHIJMES, 2015 a chapel that no longer prays, lit as if it still didSingapore · the Botanic Gardens, dusk a bandstand from 1930, one of a handful of places in the city where no one is in a hurrySingapore · Tanjong Pagar, at night shot from the window I lived behind; the view was the rentSingapore · Outram Road, 2013 Singapore, 2013. Before the AI era, this caught my own resonance with wabi-sabi. Seen through today’s AI lens, an obscure furniture shop in Singapore had put up the only argument that still holds. — Journey East, Outram Road.Singapore · Tanjong Pagar, duskSingapore · Yu Huang Gong, Telok Ayer, at night a clan house that became a temple, built by Hokkien merchants a street back from the water, when Telok Ayer was the shoreline and the gods faced the sea; the water has since moved a kilometre away, the temple has notSingapore · Keong Saik, shophouse at night conserved since 1989, and not as museum pieces: people still live upstairs, so the next generation learns the past by renting it. Hard to believe the shophouses were slums once; now they are the address. The gods have shone on SingaporeSingapore · Beach Road, the red lamp the old Supreme Court dome, the Fullerton, and forty years of banks stacked behind them; one red lamp for scale
Thailand
Bangkok · the Lebua dome the city’s one vantage that looks down on the money and up at the weatherBangkok · Monkey Pod an old house, a garden, a bar; the buying side of Thailand at its bestBangkok · Suvarnabhumi the most beautiful airport in Asia, and the one you leave through most reluctantlyBangkok · Mahanakhon, dusk a tower that looks unfinished on purpose; the city knows the feelingBangkok · from a rooftop pool, midday the view from a pool is how most people first see Bangkok; it is not wrong, only incompleteBangkok · the bar at Paii an old house, built in 1889; my favourite bar on Sathorn, where I drink, think, and repeat. The appointments, the characterPhuket · the Big Buddha forty-five metres of white marble, and the quietest place on a loud islandBangkok · the old mansion on Sathorn, at night a lit façade, the dark behind it; the scrim, if you have read the essayBangkok · soda water, mid-afternoon the national drink of anyone who has to work after lunchBangkok · Ratchaprasong the intersection the whole country has argued over, marched on and shopped at; this afternoon it is just latePattaya · the bay, from the hill the bay is beautiful from up here; that has always been Pattaya's problemPhuket · Sri Panwa, dusk a cape at the end of the island, built so that every evening arrives at the same table; the hour when the resort stops performing and the light does the work
Philippines
Manila · Makati, dusk the city goes gold for ten minutes and then admits what it isManila · Makati to the shore the city runs to the sea and stops, as if it had not decidedManila · Makati, storm light ten minutes a day the sky puts on a show; the city rarely looks upManila · Makati, at the window thirty years of this view, in one city or another: me, a laptop, a window, and the weather deciding; above a city that is not mine, doing work that is — the Pendulum in one frame
Indonesia
Jakarta · a partner's lobby the mascot wonBali · Nusa Dua a bale on the breakwaterBali · Nusa Dua the beach at nine; the resort wakes up later than the seaBali · a courtyard, the red umbrella a table, a red umbrella, and the only appointment I need to keep today in Bali: lunchJakarta · the spiral staircase the iron spiral is European, the gilt shutters are Chinese, the food is from every island; Jakarta, in one stairwellBali · Seminyak, sunsetBali · Kerobokan, sunsetJakarta · in the back of a Grab confident, unflinched; the traffic is the meeting