Q & A With Michael Yamashita
July 31, 2004
By Lia Chang
Using Marco Polo's 1299 text "The Description of the World" as his guidebook, photographer Michael Yamashita spent two years traveling in Polo's footsteps. He traversed more than 6,000 miles, often via horse or camel, through Iran, Iraq, pre-9/11 war-ravaged Afghanistan on into China- Pamirs, Xanadu, Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Sumatra, Indonesia, then returning back to Italy by way of Vietnam, Sri Lanka and India.
Encountering many of the same sights that Marco Polo wrote about in the 13th century, Yamashita shot over 10,000 frames, capturing such wonders as the remains of Xanadu, the "singing sand dunes" of Dunhuang and the huge reclining Buddha in Zhangye.
The photographs were first published in an 80-page, three-part series (May, June and July 2001) in "National Geographic" magazine. The photographic essays were the magazine's most popular of 2001 and were tapped by White Star Publishers for a sumptuous full-color book, "Marco Polo, A Photographer's Journey."
In the book - published in the fall of 2002 - Yamashita shares his own personal odyssey along with 258 photographs that illustrate Marco Polo's specific quotes directly from "The Description of the World."
Exclusively distributed by Barnes & Noble in the United States, 3,700 copies of "Marco Polo: A Photographer's Journey" sold out in the first month. When the book was published in Europe, 220,000 copies sold out immediately. “Marco Polo: A Photographer's Journey” continues to set sales records as a best-selling photographic book around the world and has been published in thirteen languages.
Q. How did you discover photography?
Just by accident. I was a very avid amateur, and I stumbled upon that during a junior year abroad studying in London and started traveling. I was attending Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, and majored in Asian history. I spent quite a bit of time traveling around Europe on a motorcycle - and in North Africa - because my sister happened to be there with Project Hope. What I came away with was an interest in travel and an interest in recording what I saw. And that was where the camera came in.
I graduated in 1971 and left immediately for Japan to live there. I had a business visa, and I had to leave the country every six months in order to renew that visa. Therefore, I did a lot of traveling. Traveling outside of Japan as well as in Japan. I went on a "roots" trip. That was the land of cameras. So that's where I bought my first good camera - a Nikon Nikkomat - to record my experiences and started seriously taking pictures. That's where it all started.
Q. Did you actually connect with your "roots" during that trip?
Yes. I ended up spending four years in Japan. Learning the language, trying to be Japanese, sort of, [laugh] which I failed at miserably. I wasn't very Japanese.
It's very difficult to be Japanese. You have to be born there. Unless you are born and raised in Japan, it is hard to become Japanese, not only because of the complexity of the language, but also the complexity of the culture requires you to have antennae that can only be developed if you are raised there.
Q. Where in Japan were you living?
I lived in Tokyo for four years and worked for a Japanese industrial marble company. I was a laborer. That was the only work I could do, because I didn't speak a word of Japanese at the time.
Q. Did you at any time feel like a fish out of water?
It was a learning experience, and that's what I was there for. I was lonely at times because I wasn't speaking anything for the first six months. I wasn't going to school either. I was learning Japanese the hard way - being thrown into a situation where nobody spoke English.
Q. That must have been strange for you given the social person that you are.
I didn't go there just for fun. I was there basically for the experience and whatever it took. That was my life at least for the first six months. I was there to learn about myself, about the culture. It was kind of a test. I was very motivated. It wasn't like I was there making friends. I was there to have a roots experience. I took it very seriously.
Q. Where did you grow up?
I was born in San Francisco, grew up in New Jersey. I had a pretty normal life, except for the fact that my siblings and I were pretty much the only Asian Americans in our schools. In the town, there were two families. At the prep school in Montclair, New Jersey,
my brother and I were the only Asian students. Montclair Academy in Montclair, New Jersey, was where I went to ninth grade through high school.
Q. Did your parents have any expectations of you?
My father worked for Mitsubishi, and he was a salary man all his life. Rose up through the ranks and got to be a vice president. But he was very supportive of the fact that I was interested in pursing photography.
When we were growing up, I was playing all kinds of sports. I was very good at them. I played football, baseball and was a wrestler. Football, I was captain of the team. I was All-State. I led the county in scoring. I was a real jock. Our dad was our biggest fan. He'd come and photograph all the games, not only in still pictures but also in 16mm color movies. He was a camera nut, a camera enthusiast. He used to photograph all the games. I was always on the other side of the camera.
My father was supportive of the fact that I was interested in doing something that was out of the ordinary and not going into these big companies the way he did. Here he had worked all his life for a large company, and he was about to get retired. He didn't feel like retiring. That was a blow to him. For him, the fact that I was doing something that he loved doing - it was his hobby, that I wanted to do this as a profession - made him really proud.
Q. What drew you to photography as a career?
Lifestyle. For me I thought, "what a great scam if you could make a living traveling the world taking pictures." That is a lot of people's dream. A photographer's dream come true.
Q. Where did you get your start in travel photography?
I got my start in Thailand. I was living in Thailand, trying to be a photographer in 1977. I had just left Japan, and I went to Thailand to join up with this guy. Steve was a professional adventurer, and he had ship in Bangkok he was building at a boatyard up at the mouth of the Tokyo River. Every day I went to meet Steve. He was a real con man. "In a short time, we'll be sailing all around Southeast Asia."
He was a great storyteller, and he'd tell me these stories about all the great things we were going to see in the South Pacific. The idea was to do a trading voyage. We were going to take Thai teak carvings to Bali and trade there for Balinese stuff. The idea was to then go to the next place.
We saw a new magazine at the time called "Geo-German." "Geo" was just starting to publish, and they were looking for new stories and any kind of new angles on travel. They gave us a lot of money, like $5000, which was a lot of money in those days.
Of course, I was a very young, wannabe, hungry photographer, and I believed Steve. Months went rolling by, and we're still building that damn boat. There was always some setback. It took forever. We finally went sailing six months later.
We did a few stories, nothing of any note, but it gave me a start and some sort of official recognition as a working photographer. The end of this trip ended in Singapore after a year of sailing around in the South China Sea and Thailand.
I had a great adventure and learned a lot about sailing and the business of photography. Steve and I were doing stories for anyone who would take a story. Though we never did the big story for "Geo," we did stories for "Asia" magazine, "Pacific" magazine, all the airline magazines. You name it, we did stories for everybody in '77 and '78.
We were so poor while we were there that if I sold a cover, then I could afford to have more than fried rice. $100 for a cover, and I could actually have some beer with my fried rice and soup. Normally, you'd have a whole pile of greens like in a Vietnamese restaurant. Thai fried rice, you always have a bunch of scallions to chew on with a big egg on top.
Q. Is this why you like fried rice so much in your early days?
[laugh] It's the main reason I work in Asia. The food. By the time I got to Singapore, I was pretty experienced - a sailor doing a lot of stories. I'd get off the boat in Singapore, anchor right in the middle of Singapore Harbor in front of that whole area that is now luxury hotels, right in the middle of downtown.
In those days, all the lighter boats were servicing the big boats and bringing cargo in. So every morning I would either flag down a boat or I would row in to shore with a portfolio, and started hanging around these agencies in Singapore. I got this offer and a visa from a small design firm, and I moved to shore, much to Steve's chagrin. I was member of his crew. He was interested in sailing; I was interested in making my career as a photographer.
Q. Prior to that experience had you ever sailed before?
No, I was a natural born sailor. I was really good at free diving. Well after all this traipsing around Asia, the other main job that I got while I was in Singapore was the
Singapore Airlines account - the biggest on my own. I was working with the smaller design firm who got me my visa. I was doing lots of little assignments for them on a freelance basis and that bought me the time to set up shop in Singapore. I went and pitched Singapore Airlines to do their destination photos all over Asia. I spent almost a year in '78 working for Singapore Airlines shooting their Asia destinations.
Q. What did they pay in those days?
A pittance. Maybe $150 a day, but it was a lot of money then for me. That gave me a portfolio. That gave me travel experience and the shooting experience I needed, so when I did pack up at the end of '78, I went back to the States.
Q. How did you land your job with National Geographic?
It was 1978, and I had just returned from Asia. I boldly walked into National Geographic one day with this Asia portfolio and went to see the now legendary director of photography Bob Gilka, who has started a lot of careers in photography. I showed him some pictures and he liked them; liked them enough to give me a hundred rolls of film and told me to go shoot him a story for World Magazine, a children's magazine.
I was headed for Europe, to build a European portfolio that said I could travel to other parts of the world. I started off in England, bought the van, did the whole hippie number, traveling in a van around Europe. When I got to France, I shot a story in a ski school. Jean-Claude Killy was at the time the greatest living legend of French skiing, an Olympic gold medalist. He founded a ski school in Southern France in the region in the Mont Blanc area--the French Alps area - to nurture more champions like himself. I did a little story, it got published, and that was the beginning.
One thing leads to another. I returned to the States and wanted to do a story on Japan. My editor said it was not a good time to pitch Japan because another guy, who was photographer of the year in the NPPA contest, was going to do a story on Hokkaido. That was November.
I got a call in January 1979. "Would you like to do that story on Hokkaido? The other photographer is sick." Career breaks. Luck. Good timing is always important. With Singapore Airlines, I was just there when they were redoing these campaigns for all their photographs in Asia. I was lucky to be there. That took all the pressure off not starving. I got that story, did a good job, and the rest is history.
Q. Who were some of your influences?
At National Geographic, where I work for now, there was Ernst Haas and [Henri] Cartier-Bresson, the father of photojournalism. I gravitated towards the color photographers of the day. The big names in color were people like Pete Turner and Ernst Haas. I was less interested in the famed photojournalists.
Q. What is in your head when you attack an assignment?
That is a good word - attack, because other people have described looking at photographers shooting a subject as attacking. You go for your subject, and your job is to capture that subject in some unique way. That is a perfect word to describe the process.
Certainly to do this work, it takes a lot of obsession. You live the subject. Some people become the subject. In my case, the easy thing about being on the road, as opposed to home, is that my day is filled with this quest for the picture. It is without distraction, which is great because there is a big difference when you are traveling and shooting as opposed to when I am home.
When you are home, you have to deal with life. On the road, you just deal with your subject. You become totally obsessed with illustrating the subject, and it is a quest every day to go out with your shoot list and you keep checking each one off. That is the process part of it. It's like a hunt, and your quarry is a picture.
Q. Describe the Marco Polo assignment and the experience.
The idea came from a book review about Frances Wood's book, "Did Marco Polo Go to China?" I thought, "This is interesting. I never questioned Marco Polo."
His name is a household name around Asia. So I thought, "Let's get to the bottom of it." I did the necessary research. The last time [National] Geographic tackled the story was in 1926. The name of the story was titled: "Marco Polo: World's Greatest Overland Traveler." I thought was a pretty catchy line.
I thought, "Isn't that a great idea for a story? Let's prove once and for all that Marco made this trip." There happened to be a window of opportunity when you could travel through places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, which had just opened up. Iraq was always closed from the last gulf war at the time. This was 1999. We applied to all of those places, and they gave us permission to come because we were shooting Marco Polo, which was seemed like a non-political story.
And it was only the fact that we had a tourist visa, we were allowed into Iraq. They gave us a lot of access, and I ended up doing a whole story on Iraq as well. The timing was perfect that I could get into all these places.
Q. The book, the exhibition and the documentary are hugely popular worldwide. What is it about this project that people find so interesting?
Certainly it was the adventure side of the story, going to places that are hard to get to. It's always nice going to places that nobody knows about. We were the first people to be in Iraq since that last war, getting a glimpse of forbidden territory. We were looking for and finding things that were talked about 700 years ago. It is great to be able to look through a modern lens at ancient history. We had a quest; we were trying to prove something, which I feel we did in the end. That he did make the trip. The timing was that I had the last glimpses of these places before the war took over, with regards to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran - Bam, Iran, which was destroyed in the earthquake. That was pretty amazing timing.
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