With or without you
By Yuriko Nakao
One photo of a young woman, wrapped in a beige blanket and standing in front of a pile of debris, became one of the iconic images right after Japan’s massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake, which triggered huge tsunamis that devastated a wide swathe of northern Japan.
Reuters, along with other major agencies, picked up the photograph run by Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, shot by Tadashi Okubo, a photographer with the paper. The image was published extensively around the world, and many people came to know her as the woman wrapped in a blanket.
Her name is Yuko Sugimoto. She is 29 and the mother of a five-year-old boy and was born and raised in Ishinomaki, where the photograph was taken. Around 3,800 people perished in Ishinomaki alone, the highest death toll for any individual city.
When the photograph was taken at 7:00 a.m. on March 13, she was staring in the direction of her son Raito’s kindergarten, which was surrounded by piles of rubble and still partly submerged by seawater. She had been searching for him since the quake hit two days before, but in vain.
How to squeeze a decade into 100 pictures
Reuters’ photographers shoot around 1,500 pictures a day, that’s 10,500 pictures a week, 547,500 a year. Times that by ten and you have some idea of the task ahead of me in selecting just 100 pictures to represent the very best of Reuters’ photography from the past decade.
In order to prevent the sheer scale of the project becoming overwhelming we had to be very clear about what we wanted to portray. Rather than telling the story of the decade we wanted to present the best of Reuters photography of the decade. Happily our photographers have produced many of the defining images of our recent history, so we found that our story was also the decade’s story.
Still the decision on what to include and what not to include was not easy. Conversely, limiting the selection to 100 pictures actually made the task easier. Some pictures stand out and stand the test of time. These shine so brightly over the years that it makes them impossible not to pick.
U.S. Marine Corp Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad April 9, 2003. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Cardinals’ vestments are blown by a gust of wind as they arrive for the funeral Mass of Pope John Paul II at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. REUTERS/Max Rossi
1.The 100th year of the 20th Century and last year of the 2nd Millennium was definitely and indisputably 2000.
2.The 1st year of the first decade of the 21st Century and of the 3rd Millennium was definitely and indisputably 2001 – obviously. The clue is in the number ’1′.
3.The 10th and last year of the first decade of the 21st century will be 2010 – obviously. The clue is in the number ’10′.
4.The last day of the first decade of the 21st century and 3rd millennium will definitely and indisputably be December 31st 2010.
There is an ongoing concerted and fraudulent effort by the BBC, Reuters and other major media players to deny these facts for cynical commercial branding and packaging purposes. This is an abuse of their position of information stream control domination.
Clear thinkers will ignore them and respect and express true and honest chronological facts and conventions.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,one more to go…
A whole year left to take more excellent pictures to put in ‘The Reuters First Decade Of The 21st Century Photography Library’.
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Resident Photographers Blog Expert
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The Wall
I would like to know how Yuko & her son is doing now?