Kevin Kelly: belief

Transcript context

…Now, my favorite creation of yours probably is this three-volume set: It’s called Vanishing Asia. If I understand correctly, it was a 50-year project based around roughly 200,000 photos; it’s three volumes. It’s one of the greatest picture books ever produced, possibly the greatest. That in turn makes it one of the greatest books ever produced. Just a few simple questions about that. Two hundred thousand photos: Where in Asia do people most like being photographed, and where do they like it the least? And why? First of all, the kind of photography I do is sometimes called street photography. It’s candid. There are some portraits, but most of the time, people are often not even aware that I’m photographing them. Other times, when I ask permission — although I would often shoot first and ask questions later. I would say, places — Actually, in some ways, China was very easy to photograph people without much resistance or hesitation. They seemed to be comfortable even if they weren’t that familiar with cameras. I think there’s something about the sense of privacy being expanded in larger range there or their sense of privacy being smaller in that sense. I think the hardest place to photograph people certainly were in some of the Islamic countries, where women were off-limits, basically, for most of photography, and even where men were shy. Or there was some kind of a civil unrest, and so there was suspicion there. I’m thinking of eastern Turkey and some other places — northern Pakistan, at one point, where there was a suspicion of anybody with a camera. In 2023, where’s the best place to see vanishing Asia now?…

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