On Her Skin -  Asako Shimizu

While reading a Japanese guidebook about Bolivia in the mid-’90s, Asako Shimizu noticed a small black-and-white photograph of a salt flat with a seemingly endless horizon. The memory of the image stuck in her mind for 10 years until finally, in 2006, she was able to visit the South American country where, inspired by the image, she created the series “On Her Skin.” 

Shimizu went to the world’s largest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni, which covers more than 4,000 square miles and is roughly 12,000 feet above sea level. If you have friends who have visited, chances are your Facebook timeline has been filled with trippy photographs that play off the optical illusion of people balancing on odd objects or holding a mini version of fellow travelers in the palm of their hands. 

She chose the title, “On Her Skin,” after thinking about her relationship with the Earth while photographing from such a high elevation. The people in some of the images are just an added bonus—Shimizu didn‘t intentionally capture them, preferring not to compose the images too much and letting people wander in by chance. 

“Once I have a miracle moment, the rest follows and that is how these series of works are created,” she wrote via email. “I was very surprised at that time when people appeared and walked by my camera.”

“The basic idea of all my works is to let a camera capture unexpected moments that are beyond my thoughts. It is my work to simply capture something of value in a subject.”

2006 Camera: Hasselblad 500C/M

The End of the Pier - Finn Hopson

After more than two years and an awful lot of standing in the sea, I’ve finally accumulated twelve images in my “End of the Pier” project. It’s not finished of course, the weather and the rust will decide that, but it finally feels like it’s at a stage where I’m thinking of it as a project, and something I may as well see through to the end. It didn’t start like this, I had no intention of starting a project, I just wanted to get an interesting image once the ballroom section had been taken away. It left such a huge space on the beach where I had only ever known there to be some sort of pier gubbins. After a few attempts it became a moderate obsession and now I feel kind of obliged to keep at it.

These days I tend to head down on the lowest tides to see how its looking, and if the light and the weather are playing ball, I’ll try and get another one for the set. For each successful image (defined by some spurious self imposed rules about the light, the time of day, calmness of sea etc) there are loads that just haven’t worked, which makes the cold feet and odd looks a little harder to deal with. Currently I’m averaging six per year, and I reckon its got a few years left in it yet. I’m well aware that photographing the West Pier is about the most clichéd thing to do here, but I’ve started so I’ll finish.