Portfolio
- Born 1956
- began taking photographs 1962
- Editor, 180 magazine
- Fotolia Interview
- Colophon
Interview
- Blog
44 Inkerman St
Guelph Ontario
Canada N1H 3C5
519-836-4357
kataylor@180degreeimaging.com
My father was in the Korean War. He was blown from the top of
his tank by a phosphorus shell and woke up in Japan.
I remember coming across a small pile of junk in one corner
of his house. There was a roof tile from Hiroshima, light where
it was in shadow, darkened where it was exposed by the bomb.
There was a large photo of my father and a Japanese woman in
a nightclub in Tokyo. He always said I had a half brother in Japan.
He also said that it took six MPs and leg irons to get him on the
boat back to Canada.
Tucked away in a little paper box was a set of 2x3 inch photos,
the edges scalloped, the paper curled. Young men in t-shirts
and tanks on the flat between mountains. Proof of a kid who
went to war and had friends, a soldier's wife, a kid of his own.
This man, who was younger than I am now when I found the
pile, is long dead and gone. The prints may still exist,
I haven't seen them for many years.
Those photographs in a box were all I had of that part of my
father's life. They will remain, along with the smell and the dust
in the sunlight, in that small jumbled corner of his tiny apartment.
The images in this box are all "straight from the camera" printed
directly from what I saw, just as my father's shots were.
They should be handled, wrinkled, lost and allowed to fade away
with time.