Photos are different from cartoons or words that in essence, they speak a thousand words. An example will be the paragraph,"We slept on makeshift beds called charpoys, made from four posts with a mattress woven from coconut-husk rope. Our bedding and washing were hung up to dry overhead. We still had plenty of clothes in those days."
Through this it is possible to visualise what the POWs are talking about, but a picture like this:
tells us a whole new story. It shows the surroundings, and tells us emotions and the feelings of the photographer when he took this through an inference.
The Changi Photographer, George Aspinall, was just 17 in 1940 and he when to sign up for war later using his cousin's birth certificate. Thsi just shows the young age of most of the POWs, as was the Changi Cartoonist. When war broke out, he left and took a folding Kodak 2 camera that was given to him by his uncle, and it later was used to take the photos of the exact scene and happenings. George didn't have a choice when the British surrendered and he became a POW.
Life was quite free as a POW at first, and George was allowed to go around taking pictures, pictorial evidence of the accounts of surviving POWs. He took pictures of the accomodations and life though was boring, was still very hard. Furthermore, George claimed that “At that time {in Changi prison camp} I regarded the whole thing as a hobby. It gave me an intense interest in doing something apart from the everyday chores. It wasn't until later years that I realised how important the photos were. But I realised right from the beginning how important it was to keep my camera hidden and to take photos secretly”.
His pictures also show the surroundings:
These surroundings show deserted land and people. These pictures describe the surroundings well. The Changi Photographer also talked about diet, which was rice, for the three and a half years which they were prisoners. The Australians were not use to rice, and furthermore the rice was broken rice and not properly cooked. This took a while of getting used to, and the picture above shows just how the Australians felt when they were eating the broken rice.
Tsun Lok
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