New Zealand digital artists help International team to restore Japan's Tsunami damaged memories

6 July 2011

The art of digital retouching is oft maligned for its association with making ordinary things look deceivingly more impressive than they are. But here is a case where the industry can bring joy to people whose lives have been devastated by a natural disaster. New Zealand retouchers are making up part of an international team who are trying to restore family photos partially-destroyed in the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami earlier this year.

The project is the brainchild of Rebecca Manson, a retoucher-turned-volunteer in Ofunato, Iwate in Japan. After almost twenty years in the retouching industry, both in London and New York she dropped everything to help with the 'All Hands' volunteering project in Japan.

"I was volunteering with All Hands volunteers, here in Ofunato and went to an evacuation centre to clean their onsen and also help with hand cleaning their photographs. The evacuees, were just overjoyed that someone was taking such care of the pictures! I also realised that some of the damaged ones I could so easily fix in Photoshop. And so could all my colleagues. So I sent out an email to them all that night and got such a great response that I realised we could really help a lot of people."

Blair Aickin, a retoucher at Method Digital in Auckland says "When you work in an industry like this, your trade is not often useful in a crisis. While this is not front-line work, it feels nice to be trying to do something for those poor people who have lost not only their physical surroundings all but their memories too. There are older people involved who have not embraced the digital age so printed photos are all they have to remember both their past generations and loved ones lost in the Tsunami."

The photos are hand cleaned in Ofunato, by a team of local volunteers and staff and are then scanned and uploaded to a cloud server. When a new batch of images are ready, Becci emails out a list of the images and lets the retouchers know that they are ready to download and be worked on.

Each image is graded 1 - 5 based on difficulty from a picture with a few marks and scratches to images with considerable reconstruction work needed. She marks these ones "Only for Jedi master retouchers." The people helping are mainly professional retouchers but some of the 1s and 2s could be attempted by others with Photoshop skills.

All Hands is a US Based non-profit organisation, that provides hands-on assistance to survivors of natural disasters around the world. By supporting volunteers with housing, meals, tools, and organised work at no charge they provide free and effective response services to communities in need.

If you think you can help, check out the link at http://hands.org/2011/06/22/project-tohoku-photo-program/ or contact Becci on photorescue@hands.org

ENDS

For more information, contact:
Alexia Santamaria on 021337772