1 00:00:01,267 --> 00:00:05,321 Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher 2 00:00:05,321 --> 00:00:08,268 based in New York City. 3 00:00:08,268 --> 00:00:10,324 We're pale, gray creatures. 4 00:00:10,324 --> 00:00:12,384 We hide in dark, windowless rooms, 5 00:00:12,384 --> 00:00:14,712 and generally avoid sunlight. 6 00:00:14,712 --> 00:00:18,976 We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, 7 00:00:18,976 --> 00:00:20,956 and the impossible possible, 8 00:00:20,956 --> 00:00:25,006 and we get criticized in the press all the time, 9 00:00:25,006 --> 00:00:28,507 but some of us are actually talented artists 10 00:00:28,507 --> 00:00:30,587 with years of experience 11 00:00:30,587 --> 00:00:34,491 and a real appreciation for images and photography. 12 00:00:34,491 --> 00:00:39,655 On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest 13 00:00:39,655 --> 00:00:43,491 of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. 14 00:00:43,491 --> 00:00:45,664 Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, 15 00:00:45,664 --> 00:00:49,506 All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, 16 00:00:49,506 --> 00:00:52,338 working as part of the response efforts. 17 00:00:52,338 --> 00:00:54,634 I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, 18 00:00:54,634 --> 00:00:56,298 knew we couldn't just sit at home, 19 00:00:56,298 --> 00:01:00,022 so I decided to join them for three weeks. 20 00:01:00,022 --> 00:01:03,667 On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. 21 00:01:03,667 --> 00:01:07,347 It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, 22 00:01:07,347 --> 00:01:09,754 about 50,000 people, 23 00:01:09,754 --> 00:01:12,559 one of the first that was hit by the wave. 24 00:01:12,559 --> 00:01:15,370 The waters here have been recorded at reaching 25 00:01:15,370 --> 00:01:18,072 over 24 meters in height, 26 00:01:18,072 --> 00:01:19,781 and traveled over two miles inland. 27 00:01:19,781 --> 00:01:23,323 As you can imagine, the town had been devastated. 28 00:01:23,323 --> 00:01:25,854 We pulled debris from canals and ditches. 29 00:01:25,854 --> 00:01:29,285 We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes 30 00:01:29,285 --> 00:01:31,783 ready for renovation and rehabilitation. 31 00:01:31,783 --> 00:01:36,235 We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses 32 00:01:36,235 --> 00:01:38,454 from the local fish processing plant. 33 00:01:38,454 --> 00:01:41,863 We got dirty, and we loved it. 34 00:01:41,863 --> 00:01:44,980 For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike 35 00:01:44,980 --> 00:01:47,220 had been finding similar things. 36 00:01:47,220 --> 00:01:50,166 They'd been finding photos and photo albums 37 00:01:50,166 --> 00:01:52,799 and cameras and SD cards. 38 00:01:52,799 --> 00:01:54,015 And everyone was doing the same. 39 00:01:54,015 --> 00:01:56,680 They were collecting them up, and handing them in to 40 00:01:56,680 --> 00:01:59,853 various places around the different towns for safekeeping. 41 00:01:59,853 --> 00:02:02,969 Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized 42 00:02:02,969 --> 00:02:05,399 that these photos were such a huge part 43 00:02:05,399 --> 00:02:08,399 of the personal loss these people had felt. 44 00:02:08,399 --> 00:02:11,193 As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, 45 00:02:11,193 --> 00:02:13,713 absolutely everything they had, 46 00:02:13,713 --> 00:02:16,537 everything had to be left behind. 47 00:02:16,537 --> 00:02:18,822 At the end of my first week there, I found myself 48 00:02:18,822 --> 00:02:22,016 helping out in an evacuation center in the town. 49 00:02:22,016 --> 00:02:25,351 I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, 50 00:02:25,351 --> 00:02:27,657 the huge giant bathtubs. 51 00:02:27,657 --> 00:02:30,094 This happened to also be a place in the town where 52 00:02:30,094 --> 00:02:33,098 the evacuation center was collecting the photos. 53 00:02:33,098 --> 00:02:35,023 This is where people were handing them in, 54 00:02:35,023 --> 00:02:37,531 and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me 55 00:02:37,531 --> 00:02:40,175 to help them start hand-cleaning them. 56 00:02:40,175 --> 00:02:43,224 Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, 57 00:02:43,224 --> 00:02:46,982 and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, 58 00:02:46,982 --> 00:02:50,393 but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box 59 00:02:50,393 --> 00:02:52,820 that something happened. 60 00:02:52,820 --> 00:02:54,873 As I looked through the photos, there were some 61 00:02:54,873 --> 00:02:56,639 were over a hundred years old, 62 00:02:56,639 --> 00:03:00,223 some still in the envelope from the processing lab, 63 00:03:00,223 --> 00:03:02,113 I couldn't help but think as a retoucher 64 00:03:02,113 --> 00:03:04,938 that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, 65 00:03:04,938 --> 00:03:08,975 and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same. 66 00:03:08,975 --> 00:03:11,362 So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook 67 00:03:11,362 --> 00:03:13,556 and asked a few of them, and by morning 68 00:03:13,556 --> 00:03:17,035 the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, 69 00:03:17,035 --> 00:03:18,900 I knew we had to give it a go. 70 00:03:18,900 --> 00:03:21,754 So we started retouching photos. 71 00:03:21,754 --> 00:03:24,547 This was the very first. 72 00:03:24,547 --> 00:03:29,154 Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused 73 00:03:29,154 --> 00:03:31,340 that discoloration on the girl's face 74 00:03:31,340 --> 00:03:34,943 had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. 75 00:03:34,943 --> 00:03:37,238 Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look 76 00:03:37,238 --> 00:03:39,938 like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic 77 00:03:39,938 --> 00:03:43,482 as having the photo damaged. 78 00:03:43,482 --> 00:03:49,810 (Applause) 79 00:03:49,810 --> 00:03:53,023 Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, 80 00:03:53,023 --> 00:03:56,497 and more retouchers were needed, 81 00:03:56,497 --> 00:03:59,435 and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, 82 00:03:59,435 --> 00:04:02,518 and within five days, 80 people wanted to help 83 00:04:02,518 --> 00:04:04,487 from 12 different countries. 84 00:04:04,487 --> 00:04:06,856 Within two weeks, I had 150 people 85 00:04:06,856 --> 00:04:08,727 wanting to join in. 86 00:04:08,727 --> 00:04:11,103 Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out 87 00:04:11,103 --> 00:04:13,715 to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, 88 00:04:13,715 --> 00:04:16,109 further north to a town called Yamada. 89 00:04:16,109 --> 00:04:19,377 Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment 90 00:04:19,377 --> 00:04:21,885 in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, 91 00:04:21,885 --> 00:04:24,258 where people were reclaiming their photos. 92 00:04:24,258 --> 00:04:28,090 The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, 93 00:04:28,090 --> 00:04:31,964 but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, 94 00:04:31,964 --> 00:04:33,873 they could give it to us, have it scanned, 95 00:04:33,873 --> 00:04:35,887 uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded 96 00:04:35,887 --> 00:04:38,520 by a gaijin, a stranger, 97 00:04:38,520 --> 00:04:40,623 somewhere on the other side of the globe, 98 00:04:40,623 --> 00:04:42,987 and it'd start being fixed. 99 00:04:42,987 --> 00:04:46,125 The time it took, however, to get it back 100 00:04:46,125 --> 00:04:48,172 is a completely different story, 101 00:04:48,172 --> 00:04:50,760 and it depended obviously on the damage involved. 102 00:04:50,760 --> 00:04:52,493 It could take an hour. It could take weeks. 103 00:04:52,493 --> 00:04:54,597 It could take months. 104 00:04:54,597 --> 00:04:58,714 The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, 105 00:04:58,714 --> 00:05:02,416 or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color 106 00:05:02,416 --> 00:05:04,846 and detail that the water hadn't damaged. 107 00:05:04,846 --> 00:05:07,591 It was very time-consuming. 108 00:05:07,591 --> 00:05:10,212 Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, 109 00:05:10,212 --> 00:05:13,543 submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, 110 00:05:13,543 --> 00:05:16,984 in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time 111 00:05:16,984 --> 00:05:18,928 is going to continue to damage them, 112 00:05:18,928 --> 00:05:22,044 so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. 113 00:05:22,044 --> 00:05:25,014 We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, 114 00:05:25,014 --> 00:05:28,030 dry and reclaimed. 115 00:05:28,030 --> 00:05:30,482 Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. 116 00:05:30,482 --> 00:05:33,719 We had an amazing local woman who guided us. 117 00:05:33,719 --> 00:05:37,912 It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. 118 00:05:37,912 --> 00:05:39,697 As my team leader Wynne once said, 119 00:05:39,697 --> 00:05:41,643 it's like doing a tattoo on someone. 120 00:05:41,643 --> 00:05:45,174 You don't get a chance to mess it up. 121 00:05:45,174 --> 00:05:48,157 The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, 122 00:05:48,157 --> 00:05:50,387 as far as the photos go. 123 00:05:50,387 --> 00:05:52,769 She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped 124 00:05:52,769 --> 00:05:55,188 when she realized she was doing more damage. 125 00:05:55,188 --> 00:05:57,439 She also had duplicates. 126 00:05:57,439 --> 00:06:00,532 Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise 127 00:06:00,532 --> 00:06:02,636 would have been completely impossible to fix, 128 00:06:02,636 --> 00:06:05,494 we could just put them together in one good photo, 129 00:06:05,494 --> 00:06:07,946 and remake the whole photo. 130 00:06:07,946 --> 00:06:10,624 When she collected the photos from us, 131 00:06:10,624 --> 00:06:12,987 she shared a bit of her story with us. 132 00:06:12,987 --> 00:06:15,947 Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues 133 00:06:15,947 --> 00:06:17,937 at a local fire department in the debris 134 00:06:17,937 --> 00:06:21,053 a long way from where the home had once stood, 135 00:06:21,053 --> 00:06:23,228 and they'd recognized him. 136 00:06:23,228 --> 00:06:25,509 The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge 137 00:06:25,509 --> 00:06:28,036 of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. 138 00:06:28,036 --> 00:06:31,164 He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. 139 00:06:31,164 --> 00:06:34,606 Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys 140 00:06:34,606 --> 00:06:36,796 were both at school, separate schools. 141 00:06:36,796 --> 00:06:39,364 One of them got caught up in the water. 142 00:06:39,364 --> 00:06:41,311 It took her a week to find them all again 143 00:06:41,311 --> 00:06:43,708 and find out that they had all survived. 144 00:06:43,708 --> 00:06:46,638 The day I gave her the photos also happened to be 145 00:06:46,638 --> 00:06:50,581 her youngest son's 14th birthday. 146 00:06:50,581 --> 00:06:54,254 For her, despite all of this, those photos 147 00:06:54,254 --> 00:06:56,965 were the perfect gift back to him, 148 00:06:56,965 --> 00:07:00,061 something he could look at again, something he remembered from before 149 00:07:00,070 --> 00:07:04,328 that wasn't still scarred from that day in March 150 00:07:04,328 --> 00:07:07,143 when absolutely everything else in his life had changed 151 00:07:07,143 --> 00:07:11,292 or been destroyed. 152 00:07:11,292 --> 00:07:13,149 After six months in Japan, 153 00:07:13,149 --> 00:07:16,299 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, 154 00:07:16,299 --> 00:07:18,549 hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean 155 00:07:18,549 --> 00:07:21,789 over 135,000 photographs, 156 00:07:21,789 --> 00:07:27,493 the large majority — (Applause) — 157 00:07:27,493 --> 00:07:30,723 a large majority of which did actually find their home again, 158 00:07:30,723 --> 00:07:33,478 importantly. 159 00:07:33,478 --> 00:07:36,651 Over five hundred volunteers around the globe 160 00:07:36,651 --> 00:07:41,309 helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, 161 00:07:41,309 --> 00:07:43,559 fully restored and retouched. 162 00:07:43,559 --> 00:07:46,012 During this time, we hadn't really spent more than 163 00:07:46,012 --> 00:07:48,858 about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, 164 00:07:48,858 --> 00:07:52,188 most of which was printer inks. 165 00:07:52,188 --> 00:07:55,075 We take photos constantly. 166 00:07:55,075 --> 00:07:57,644 A photo is a reminder of someone or something, 167 00:07:57,644 --> 00:08:00,502 a place, a relationship, a loved one. 168 00:08:00,502 --> 00:08:03,011 They're our memory-keepers and our histories, 169 00:08:03,011 --> 00:08:05,723 the last thing we would grab 170 00:08:05,723 --> 00:08:08,231 and the first thing you'd go back to look for. 171 00:08:08,231 --> 00:08:10,335 That's all this project was about, 172 00:08:10,335 --> 00:08:13,766 about restoring those little bits of humanity, 173 00:08:13,766 --> 00:08:15,878 giving someone that connection back. 174 00:08:15,878 --> 00:08:21,571 When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, 175 00:08:21,571 --> 00:08:23,655 it makes a huge difference 176 00:08:23,655 --> 00:08:26,440 in the lives of the person receiving it. 177 00:08:26,440 --> 00:08:30,243 The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. 178 00:08:30,243 --> 00:08:33,314 For some of them, it's given them a connection 179 00:08:33,314 --> 00:08:35,846 to something bigger, giving something back, 180 00:08:35,846 --> 00:08:37,725 using their talents on something 181 00:08:37,725 --> 00:08:41,145 other than skinny models and perfect skin. 182 00:08:41,145 --> 00:08:43,758 I would like to conclude by reading an email 183 00:08:43,758 --> 00:08:46,188 I got from one of them, Cindy, 184 00:08:46,188 --> 00:08:50,790 the day I finally got back from Japan after six months. 185 00:08:50,790 --> 00:08:54,545 "As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals 186 00:08:54,545 --> 00:08:57,694 and the stories represented in the images. 187 00:08:57,694 --> 00:09:01,181 One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, 188 00:09:01,181 --> 00:09:05,557 from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, 189 00:09:05,557 --> 00:09:09,079 struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, 190 00:09:09,079 --> 00:09:11,531 my grandmother and mother, myself, 191 00:09:11,531 --> 00:09:14,940 and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall. 192 00:09:14,940 --> 00:09:18,094 Across the globe, throughout the ages, 193 00:09:18,094 --> 00:09:21,983 our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?" 194 00:09:21,983 --> 00:09:24,300 Thank you. (Applause) 195 00:09:24,300 --> 00:09:27,766 (Applause)