Portraits of Kyoto
It was on a Monday in February last year, only weeks before international travel was grounded due to Covid-19, when Russel Wong received a text message from a friend in Kyoto: there is a forecast for snow in the city on Friday morning. When the forecast remained on Wednesday, Wong immediately bought his plane ticket and arrived in Kyoto on Thursday night, just in time to capture the winter scene at the golden pavilion of the iconic Kinkakuji Temple the next morning (see p.24).
Such are the lengths that the Singaporean photographer, renowned for making portraits of Hollywood celebrities such as magazine covers, would go to get the perfect shot. You see, it hardly ever snows in Kyoto—and Wong would know for he has made between six to eight trips annually to the old capital of Japan over the past 13 years, with the singular focus of documenting the lives of the city’s geisha community, or in the local dialect, along with the beauty of its nature and architecture.
