“Thank You for Making the Magazine Better”
Cindy Palmano on Nakajo, care, and the freedom to play

There was no shared language to speak of. Nakajo Masayoshi, Art Director of Hanatsubaki, spoke no English. Cindy Palmano, the London-based photographer who shot some of the magazine’s most enduring covers — and some of its most beloved features — through the late 1980s and 1990s, spoke no Japanese. Between them stood Keiko Hirayama, editor-in-chief of Hanatsubaki at the time, who acted as both bridge and procurer — travelling to London each season, discussing ideas, bringing things back, and letting Nakajo select.

“Short messages would come via Keiko,” Cindy recalls. “I couldn’t actually communicate directly with Nakajo. But I trusted his sensibility, and I knew when he liked stuff.” In the absence of words, something else did the talking. “I think the relationship was initiated by Keiko, but Nakajo and I shared a sensibility — and he realized that we could work well together.” She thinks for a moment. “He chose to work with me because we had a similar sense of humour, probably.”

Playing, seriously

The collaboration existed within a very particular moment. Japan and England, Cindy says, had an extraordinary relationship in those years — a kind of love affair, two island nations that recognized something in each other. England was producing a wave of designers — Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano — who were changing fashion from the inside out, and the energy was spilling into the clubs and studios and small shops that were quietly reshaping culture. Keiko was at the centre of it, travelling between London and Tokyo each season, alert to everything that was emerging. “She spotted something,” Cindy says simply, “and she was right.”

What that working relationship made possible was, by any measure, extraordinary. Cindy was in her mid-twenties when she began shooting covers for Hanatsubaki. Nakajo backed proposals that no other magazine would have entertained. A trip to Mali to photograph the Dogon people. Roses, shot quietly in London, accompanied by Nakajo’s own illustrations. Three weeks in Cornwall, in pursuit of fairies, magic, and the unanswerable question of whether the spirit world exists.

“There was no other magazine I could work with that would back just some ideas like this,” she says. “I couldn’t go to Vogue or anyone who would do a story on architecture or roses.” The freedom was mutual and absolute. “I was quite unlimited, unrestricted — and he was unrestricted.” She pauses. “He was a maverick.”

Nakajo and Keiko even came to Devon for the Cornwall shoot. “We actually had a lot of fun,” Cindy says. “We really played. And of course it was informed by ideas, and we worked very hard — but it was playing as much as photography.”

The door, and what came after

The trust ran deep enough to survive — perhaps even to be cemented by — a single, memorable disagreement.

For one cover, Cindy had used a rare and technically demanding printing process called dye transfer, which required the image to be mounted in a very specific way to go onto the printing roll. When she arrived in Japan and saw how it had been handled, she was devastated by the quality. “I was so upset that I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I just shut the door. I feel so embarrassed,” she laughs now.

Nakajo went back to the printers. He pressed them to do it again, properly, on the roll. The quality improved. And then he came to find her.

“He said, ‘Thank you for making the magazine better.'” She stops. “I think he actually had learned the English to say it, maybe.”

It is a small sentence, and possibly a learned one. But it said everything. “They knew that I really cared. And he cared too. Our ambition was about care.”

What they shared

That word — care — sits at the heart of how Cindy understands the whole collaboration. It is what connected her to Nakajo, to Keiko, and to an audience she had never imagined. The roses, shot alone in London and sent across to Tokyo, moved people in ways she never anticipated. Fan letters arrived at the magazine and were forwarded on to her. And Cindy seems genuinely surprised to learn, in the course of this conversation, that readers had been making special trips to cosmetics counters since their high school days just to pick up a copy. “It’s impossible to know how anything you do is received,” she says. “But I think the Japanese audience is a very poetic one.”

That quality of attention — from the audience, from Nakajo, from Keiko — is what made the work possible. “I always got a sense from Keiko and Nakajo that they appreciated,” she says. “They had my back. And that means you can just play — and sometimes you pull it off, and sometimes it’s not so good.” She is quiet for a moment. “You don’t know when you’re being free if it’s going to survive the test of time. But if you’re so careful that you only release things that are perfect — well, you can’t really make anything at all.” She pauses. “He was very productive. Some of it is good and some of it probably isn’t. But overall, it’s a great big body of work — and most of it has stood the test of time. Most of it really has.”

The relationship, despite the language barrier, was easy. Warm, even. Cindy tells a story almost as an afterthought: walking in Japan one day, surrounded by a large group of people, her child young and on her mind — she reached out instinctively and took Nakajo’s hand to cross the road.

“And we crossed the road,” she says, “and I thought, what am I doing? Neither of us said anything. We just sort of pretended it hadn’t happened.” She laughs. “But I suppose that gives you a sense of it. It was a very easy relationship. It didn’t feel formal. It was friendly.”

Cindy Palmano
Photographer. Based in London, Palmano has worked across fashion, music, and culture since the late 1980s, and is known for her bold sense of humour and unconventional approach to fashion photography. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, she collaborated extensively with Hanatsubaki, shooting numerous covers and features. Working with Masayoshi Nakajo and then editor-in-chief Keiko Hirayama, she helped create some of the magazine’s most free-spirited and experimental pages.