Three decades of field reporting across Asia to understand its history as a lived experience

History does not live exclusively in archives. It lives in the places that absorbed it and do not disappear. It can be found in the physical objects that outlasted the people who held them, in the individuals who remember what the documents do not record, and in the landscapes that still carry the shape of what happened on them.

Three decades of working across Asia taught me that the most reliable way to understand a region’s history is to stand inside it, repeatedly, over time, and pay attention to what changes and what does not. That is not a methodology anyone handed me. It developed from the work itself, beginning in 1996 in Hiroshima, and it has not stopped accumulating since.

I was not a photojournalist when I first walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I was a young American moving through Japan for the first time, carrying a camera, operating on a raw instinct to capture the world I saw around me on film.

In a small green space between Hiroshima Castle and the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome, called the Hannover Garden, I photographed a group of Japanese schoolchildren having a picnic lunch. I did not know at the time that the image would become the first photograph for which I would earn an award. I also did not see, at the time, that being in Japan gave me permission to accept my creative nature. Or that I had embarked on a long journey that would eventually see me become a photojournalist.

On that cold day in 1996, I knew only that something in the frame was true in a way I wanted to keep making true. That photograph was the origin point of everything that followed in my life and career. But it would be years later before I could track back and determine that it was a starting point, of sorts. Not a preordained or mythical experience, just something I could point to and recognize that there had always been magic surrounding me in how I saw the world, and that photo offered my first moment of clarity.

The work that developed from that origin was not built through tourism. It was built through residence. I lived in Okazaki in 2001, in China from 2002 to 2010, and in Kamakura until 2011. Living in a country, and multiple countries, is a different experience from visiting. Tourism offers a surface. Residence gives a system, like the way a city moves in the morning, the unspoken expectations at a neighborhood restaurant, the rhythms that do not perform themselves for outsiders. Japan, and later China, gave me those systems slowly, and I was not always a fast learner.

One example is as simple as eating a rice bowl. The host father of my 1996 trip told me a story when we stopped for lunch in the fishing port of Yobuko, at the northern tip of the Higashimatsuura Peninsula in Saga Prefecture. He knew I was relatively new to using chopsticks. I had been using them in Milwaukee for months, preparing for my trip. But his sister-in-law instructed me properly on how to hold them, while I was staying with family in the Ōfuna district of Kamakura city in Kanagawa Prefecture.

When my host father was a child in the decade after World War 2, food was scarce enough that finishing every grain from your bowl was both a necessity and a point of pride. He framed it as a competition among his young siblings, who could collect every grain first from their bowl. I took up the challenge, which he had not intended, to show that I could manage chopsticks with a level of precision.

When I showed him my empty bowl, clean of every grain of rice, we shared a moment of pride and respect. Over the following 30 years, when I eat a bowl of rice with chopsticks, I do so with his story in my mind. That is what residence produces. Not facts about a place. A physical habit shaped by a person’s lived memory of a specific experience, which is connected to a historical condition.

That kind of transmission, history moving through people into behavior, is what no archive fully captures. It is what field work can reach, and what other forms of research cannot. And it accumulates. Each place adds a layer to the way the next place is experienced. My experiences in 1996 informed my life in Okazaki, and then later in Kamakura. I carried all that with me in 2026, from Tokyo’s Sengakuji neighborhood to the Urakami district of Nagasaki. Each place had a surface geography, like anchors in space that allowed me to climb deeper into the substance underneath.

That accumulation does not stop at Japan. China added its own layers across eight years of residence, and the cross-strait history that this series examines runs through both. The 1895 treaty signed at Shimonoseki, to end the First Sino-Japanese War, gave Japan control over Taiwan. It was a transaction that would impact world events for the following century.

I have experienced the spectacle of being a witness to amazing things, but also utter destruction and devastation across the decades. Each place where I stand educates and informs me about the past, but also the future, for the next place I will stand. These stories and lessons are part of life, which is hard to understand in our youth with limited experience and the ability to have perspective for how anything fits together.

Thirty years of this photojournalism work produced an archive, but as a result of a method. I did not know I could read environments spatially and retain them. In 1996, I navigated ancient cities with paper maps and landmark orientation, not addresses. I plotted relationships between things rather than memorizing routes. My journal from 1996 was a record of breadcrumbs for the future to follow.

I formed attachments to specific places and then returned to them. Not as tourism. As verification. To see what changed and what did not. The camera was the tool. My habits developed through everything that came with carrying it. Those skills are still serving me 30 years later.