Floating lotus leaves, Akita, Japan © Tony Maniaty 2025.JPG

JOURNAL

7 October 2025
Kathryn Hunyor interview with Sydney-based photographer Tony Maniaty

Gazing at the Paper Moon: In conversation with Tony Maniaty

You've travelled to more than 30 countries, been an international news correspondent for many years, voraciously read Mishima in your 20s and wrote a film about a Japanese businessman - but until last year you'd never been to Japan. What took you so long?

Tony: The answer is both complex, and simple. My work, which largely dictated my travels, never took me to northern Asia - and when I did manage time off, I usually headed to Greece, my father’s ancestral land, or France, my spiritual home. But there was also a feeling that Japan represented something far beyond my own sense of being and place, which by birth was postwar Anglo-Australian society and included a need to discover my European roots, balanced somewhere between Greece, France and Britain. Until I’d established that ‘stability of identity’, I felt I wasn’t ready to overload myself with deep immersion in another distinct culture.

So I was waiting for a time in my life when I could absorb the place called Japan fully into the identity that I needed to shape first.

When we met, you said that you'd almost been 'saving Japan', or waiting for Japan - was this because you had high expectations? Were you worried it wouldn't match the image you'd held since you were young?

Tony: I had no expectations of Japan at all. I’d long realised that cherry blossoms and Ginza neon were essentially window-dressing, that there was much more. In my first year of high school, I had a Japanese penfriend called George Wakamatsu, who sent me a box of Kodakchrome slides of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I still have them!

My first real dive into Japan beyond the tourist brochures was in 1977, when I began writing fiction and became fascinated with the life and death of Yukio Mishima, who’d taken his own life in very dramatic circumstances only seven years earlier. I set about reading his key work, including The Sea of Fertility quartet of novels, which proved to be a powerful entry into Japanese history and codes of behaviour - but not, I’d again add, into ‘the minds of the Japanese people’; Mishima himself was careful not to fall into that literary trap, and his own life was indeed full of essentially human contradictions, of sexual and spiritual confusion, a love and rejection of Western culture, an embrace of celebrity and fame against the need for privacy to write and think, and so on. He was in no way ‘typically Japanese’, and his work to me affirmed there could be no such thing. Rather than offer an explanation about the mysteries of Japan that might await me, Mishima opened a door into an even more obscure world, into the ‘unknowability’ of Japan. So I stared at that door for many decades before I decided to go through it and see what I could find there. About Japan – and, in Japan, about myself.

When I asked you what you were hoping to do, you said you wanted to find "your Japan". What did you mean by this?

Tony: After a life of journalism and perpetually covering war, conflict, political, economic and social tensions, all that negativity has a profound impact on your psyche. I found myself wanting to search, in quite the opposite direction, for love and beauty.

In spirit that sounds highly romantic, but I don’t mean I was looking for softness and sweetness, just the opposite: some sense of self that was strongly poetic, that also triggered a very muscular sense of my own being. I had always been an enthusiast by nature, but covering news eventually drains you of that energy and takes you nowhere, just as listening to and watching the news drains most of the world of any enthusiasm for a brighter future.

So I embarked on a more personal journey, to recover whatever I’d lost. And increasingly the notion of going to Japan came into mind, not as a place to ‘visit’ or even to photograph, but as a locale where I might begin to discover love and beauty, in the raw physical sense but also in encounters with people. In that way too, the ‘nation’ of Japan would disappear and instead become ‘my’ Japan, the unique Japan of my experience alone.

I don’t know what I’m looking for until I see it, and then it becomes the subject, and how I photograph it makes it real to me. So having no expectations becomes itself the driver of my creativity.

Knowing you, and knowing Japan, it occurs to me that you've both been devastated by war. Has this occurred to you too? What is your response to my observation?

Tony: Your response is very pertinent. I was born in 1949, only four years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and after the Holocaust, so my childhood in Brisbane was haunted by images and newsreels of these events and enlivened by endless boyhood games that emulated the Second World War that our fathers and uncles had fought. In my teenage years the Vietnam War erupted and dominated my life, more so when I was conscripted to fight there; and as a young ABC News journalist, and later at Reuters TV and BBC in London, every other story seemed to be about conflict somewhere in the world.

In 1975 I covered the war in East Timor, in which five of my television colleagues were killed. I’ve suffered a lot of trauma from that experience. So war and the suffering and confusion it produces have underlined my entire life, and unfortunately continues to do so. In a way I’ve always been aware too of how traumatised the Japanese people were, and still are, by what happened to them, and to nobody else.

What sort of damaged people would we be now if Germany or Japan had dropped an atomic bomb on Sydney or New York or London in 1945? My whole childhood and adolescence and early adulthood was spent under the shadow of the Cold War, but apart from a few terrifying days during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war, that notion of annihilation was rather abstract, whereas for the Japanese it was reality in extremis.

When you took your Leica to Japan, did you have an idea of what you wanted to capture? How did you approach the creative process of capturing 'your Japan'?

Tony: It’s strange, I went to Japan with the definite intention of taking photographs, to capture something with my cameras, but of what exactly I had no idea. I photographed the 2020 Covid pandemic in Paris, and how that affected people in the streets; and in 2022 I went to Athens to photograph the ‘New Athenians’, recent arrivals who were transforming the city. So both were very definite subjects.

But Japan was a kind of blank canvas for me; I had no idea what to expect, what I would find or how I would find it. All I knew was that I was looking for love and beauty, and how those elements would present themselves to me, and how I could frame them in the available light and capture them through the lens. So from the outset I knew that ‘Paper Moon’ would be my collective response not to Japan as a ‘subject’, as it appears to others, or generically to the world, but a place where my latent curiosity could be met with visual responses that could be collected into something I would call ‘my Japan’.

Mostly, as you’ll see, these are not vistas but rather small moments, corners and walls, empty rooms, elements of nature. Although Japan is a very crowded country, at least in the cities, there are not a lot of people in these photographs. I went searching not so much for people but rather for a sense of place, of ma in Japanese. In that sense, although I appear in none of the images, the photographs are an expression both of how I found Japan, and how I found myself in Japan. In that sense, the exhibition is a kind of self-portrait.

Looking at the images you took, what is your impression of your photographic journey there, and the results? Do you think you've captured something quintessentially Japanese? Have you captured your Japan?

Tony: First, there is a technical consideration here. I bought my first Leica (second-hand, M3) back in 1971, and mastered the basics of photography, including developing the film in chemicals and printing my own work in the darkroom. That of course limited me to only 36 frames per film, and film was expensive; so selecting the right shot and moment to press the shutter became vital. These days I use a digital camera (mainly Leica Q) quite happily, which means I can shoot almost endlessly. Yet the discipline of the great single shot remains, and the images in ‘Paper Moon’ are often the most fleeting and incidental of those I’ve taken in Japan. Does that perhaps make them quintessentially Japanese?

On the other hand, some of the images I took also required a lot of patience, standing and seeing what might happen next, which may also be a Japanese quality. The overall feeling I have is that Japan is a country in anticipation, waiting for its next phase. What that is, nobody knows. There is a sense of great global uncertainty in these times, but in Japan I felt it was influenced more by historical weight than by any current events; Japan seems less an ‘empire of signs’, as the French philosopher Roland Barthes said in 1966, than an empire of warnings. Cities can be devastated in a flash, whole economies can collapse overnight, nature can wreak instant chaos and tragedy. So much so that Japan becomes less a land of growth than a place where things ephemeral can be here today and gone tomorrow; while other things, equally fragile and seemingly temporary, can absorb and reflect a thousand years of history. One is never sure what constitutes the entity called Japan; one must wait and see, and keep looking and searching. This sense of ‘waiting’ was very strong for me, it materialised as a form of anxiety matched with a sense of fatalism, and I hope I’ve captured some of that too in these images.

To me, ultimately, photography isn’t only about ‘seeing’ what’s before my eyes, nor even about the impact that level of insight has on me, but how much of myself I can bring to the photograph so that the moment of capture becomes uniquely mine and reflects who I am, as much as the situation it describes to the viewer.

Finally, how did you come up with the title ‘Paper Moon’ and what does it allude to?

Tony: I think titles are critically important, not only to attract the attention of viewers and audiences, and not to describe in any way the work itself, but to establish some sense of the mood contained within the work. I’d always like the title ‘Where the Moon Goes’, which implies something hidden: the moon always exists, yet we see it only at night, at wherever we are on Earth at any night. And then I heard the familiar song “Paper Moon’ and I was struck by the lyric ‘it’s only a paper moon, hanging over a cardboard sea’, and likewise the ephemeral nature of paper lanterns, which seem so very Japanese to me.

So ‘Paper Moon’ reflects both the fragility and fleeting nature of these moments, and ultimately, their expression of love and beauty, the very qualities I was searching for.

TONY MANIATY
Tony Maniaty is a Sydney-based photographer, journalist and author of Greek-Australian ancestry. His career spans a wide range of creative roles – photojournalist, foreign correspondent, documentary maker, screenwriter and fiction author. He was the Paris-based European Correspondent for SBS Television, Executive Producer of ABC Television’s ‘7.30 Report,’ and Associate Professor of Creative Practice at UTS Sydney. In 2020, his photography of the Covid-19 pandemic on the streets of Paris resulted in the exhibition and photobook, ‘Our Hearts Are Still Open’. He holds a Doctorate in Media Studies, and his photographs have appeared in journals and newspapers globally including the Paris-based Eye of Photography, US Publishers Weekly, Good Weekend, Leica Fotografie International, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. He uses Leica cameras exclusively.