Terri Gold: Still Points in a Turning World

Photo © Terri Gold-All Rights Reserved
Terri Gold's artistic creativity and energy were patently obvious during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ , as she moved from one photo shoot in a village to the next photographing with her two cameras; one "normal" like those used by the rest of us, and the second professionally modified to shoot infrared.

She is an award-winning photographer and artist based in New York City, and built an impressive reputation for her rituals, rites of passage, festivals, celebrations and portraits from all over the world.

Her infrared photographs of Rajasthan and Gujarat as an audio slideshow have now been added to her ongoing personal project “Still Points in a Turning World” which focuses on Asia’s vanishing tribal heritage.

With her acknowledged expertise in infrared photography and its intricate post-processing, Terri provides personalized hands-on tutorship to photographers who are interested in the craft. So visit her website, and email her to learn this exciting photographic technique that is growing in popularity.

A previous post on Terri's photography is here.

Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition™

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Setting up of the Bali: Island of Odalan Photo-Expedition™ has been completed for a while, and the participants will shortly have to advise me their flight schedules. Time flies!!

The photo~expedition is especially structured for established photographers interested in documentary photography, ethno-photography and multimedia, and for those ready to create visual projects from their inventory of photographs, and learn how to control story length, intent, pace, use of music and ambient sound, narration, field recordings and interviews.

As in 2007, the base for this year's photo-expedition is a small Balinese-owned boutique hotel amidst a working rice-paddy in the art center town of Ubud.

Matjaž Krivic: Mali (& Baaba Maal!)

Here's another post on Matjaž Krivic's work. This time, it's Mali that he shares with us in this lovely audio-slideshow-movie (he calls it multivision...not a bad name.).

Matjaž just returned from an overland road trip from Slovenia to Nepal via Senegal (Dakar to Katmandu), which took him 13 months of living and photographing out of a 4x4 Nissan Patrol.

For 20 years, he globe-trotted the world capturing the personality and grandeur of indigenous people and places, and found the time to be awarded many prizes, and recognized in various venues and exhibitions. He traveled in Yemen, Mali, Tibet, North and West Africa, Iran, Mongolia, China, Nepal and India.

The spectacular music accompanying the slideshow is Dunya Salam ("world of peace") by the legendary Senegalese singer Baaba Maal. An excellent choice!

So choose full screen, turn up the volume of your speakers and enjoy the show!

The Travel Photographer's Motion

I set up The Travel Photographer's Motion as a parallel portal (using the F8 Graph Paper Press theme) for my audio slideshows, which are originally produced in the SoundSlides format, and subsequently converted to mp4s, then uploaded to Vimeo. I have no real preference between Vimeo or YouTube, and I'll eventually have these mp4s uploaded on both.

The current line-up consists of Baneshwar: Pind Daan (the annual rite of remembrance for Rajasthan tribals), White Shadows (my favorite! The sad life of the widows of Vrindavan), Debates at the Sangha (Buddhist debates in a Bhutanese monastery...much more animated than those in our Senate), Gnawa (the rhythmic Sufis of Morocco), The Street Chinese Opera (intense musical cacophony in NYC's Chinatown) and Cham! (the tsechus of Bhutan).

More of my audio-slideshows converted to mp4s are in the works.

Both Vimeo and YouTube’s have adopted the HTML5 video element (although the former is restricted and the latter is in beta), which permits most browsers (not Firefox, I think) to bypass the Flash plug-in and use video native to the browser’s player. That will prove useful for such movies to be seen on the iPad.

George Steinmetz: Aerial Views

The New Yorker magazine's online edition is featuring a video in which George Steinmetz discusses his career and techniques with Lauren Collins, who had traveled with him to Algeria.

George Steinmetz is a photographer known for his explorations of remote deserts, obscure cultures, and mysteries of science and technology. He is regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO Magazines, and explored subjects ranging from the remotest stretches of Arabia’s Empty Quarter to the unknown tree people of Irian Jaya. He has won numerous awards for photography during his 25-year career,including two first prizes in science and technology from World Press Photo. He has also won awards and citations from Pictures of the Year, Overseas Press Club and Life Magazine's Alfred Eisenstadt Awards.

Once you're done with watching the interview in the video above, take a look at Steinmetz's website. You'll be rewarded with large gorgeous photographs of the remote areas he explored, both from the air and on land.

I think his aerial photographs are more accessible and intimate than those by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, because he photographs from a motorized paraglider at heights of 100-500 feet above ground, rather than a small airplane.

Francesco Lastrucci: Kashgar

Photo © Francesco Lastrucci-All Rights Reserved
Here's the work of Francesco Lastrucci, an Italian freelance photographer who specializes in editorial stories. He's currently based between Italy, New York and Hong Kong from where he works on projects involving Europe, Latin America and East Asia.

From Francesco's diverse editorial stories, including a story of the ubiquitous areca nut and betel leaf chewing in Taiwan (as indeed it is in many other Asian countries), and its marketing by beautiful young women, I chose his excellent work on Kashgar, the capital city of the Uyghur.

The Uyghur live in modern Xinjiang, the westernmost province of China, but the name Xinjiang is considered offensive by many Uyghur who prefer to use Uyghurstan or Eastern Turkestan. Kashgar is an oasis city with approximately 350,000 inhabitants, and its old city has been deemed overcrowded and unsafe for its residents, and will have at least 85% of its structures demolished. Demolitions have already begun, with many of its former denizens forced to move.

Kashgar’s old city has been called “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in Central Asia, but it is now being razed by the Chinese government which plans to replace the old buildings with new.

Luciano Rodriguez Pena: Holi & Kumbh

India Khumbamela from SENSES on Vimeo.

Here's a movie by Spanish photographer Luciano Rodriguez Pena, made during a recent trip to India. It features two main events during the first three months of this year: Haridwar Kumbh Mela and Holi. I liked the colors (as befits a country such as India) and the tremendous energy which the movie imparts. I wish there was a different soundtrack to it, but the stills and the movie make up for that.

Luciano is a Nature & Travel photographer, and teaches digital photography in various photography schools in Madrid.

Holi is a festival of color and was recently celebrated all over India. It's an exuberant festival which aims at infusing fresh hope to people as it marks the end of the winter days and the start of summer. The Kumbh Mela in Haridwar is a three month-long bathing festival along the Ganges river which occurs every 12 years, and about 50 million Hindu devotees performing their prayers and washing away their sins in river's waters are expected in this holy city.

Jamie Williams: Tibet

Photo © Jamie Williams-All Rights Reserved
Here's some really terrific imagery of Tibet by photographer Jamie Williams, who's based in Sydney, Australia.

His biography is unfortunately sparse, and apart from dividing his time between photographing editorial and commercial imagery, and pursuing his own personal projects, we know that he won quite a impressive awards to include Honorable Mentions in Prix De La Photographie (Paris), and that he worked with many publications to include Australian Airlines Magazine, In Style, World Expeditions, etc.

There are quite a few of photographs in Jamie's Tibet gallery that I ought to mention; the juxtaposition of the prayer scrolls and the Mani stones images, the Tibetan woman with the prayer wheel in silhouette (above), the woman cradling a baby near a pile of Mani stones, and the woman walking underneath prayer flags in a village...just to mention a few. The gallery consists of 47 images, so you'll need a few minutes to enjoy them. And the photographs are big...really big! The size that photo editors want and like.

His travel galleries also include imagery from Nepal, India, Kashgar, Kyrgyzstan, his native Australia and Papua New Guinea.

The Hijras (Eunuchs) of Becharaji

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Eunuchs, transsexuals, or transgender men are known as hijras in South Asia. They adopt feminine gender identity, women's clothing and other feminine gender roles. Etymologically, the word hijra is an Urdu word, seemingly derived from the Arabic root hijr or emigration in the sense of "leaving one's family, tribe or country," and it has been borrowed into Hindi.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Many hijra live in all-male communities, and have sustained themselves over generations by "adopting" young boys who are rejected by, or flee their family. Many work as male sex workers for survival. According to estimates by health organizations, only 10% of hijras are actually castrated.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
During my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ , we stayed at the immaculate and well-run Rann Riders resort in Dasada, and its knowledgeable owner Muzahid Malik, suggested we visited Becharaji where hijras frequented its temple.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
As I walked in to the temple ahead of my group, I chanced upon hijras who, upon seeing me, started to clap their hands and laughing. Not really catching on that this was their trademark way of announcing their presence and sexual persuasion, I imitated them and clapped in exactly the same way...one hand on the top of the other, rather than sideways. This drove them to raucous laughter, and eventually to self-consciously pose for our cameras.

There are many stories told about the hijras, and how they extort money by embarrassing shopkeepers and guests at wedding parties, but those we met at the Becharaji temple were friendly and obviously delighted that we took such nonjudgmental interest in them. Naturally, there was some posturing for the cameras, and much competition for the most suggestive poses.

Muzahid invited me to spend a couple of weeks in Dasada. Perhaps I will...After all, there's a hijra festival at Becharaji in late summer. Another potential destination for a photo~expedition?

For a book on hijras, read Zia Jaffrey's The Invisibles.

Matjaž Krivic: Earth Temples

Photo © Matjaž Krivic-All Rights Reserved
Matjaž Krivic describes his whereabouts as traveling with his camera somewhere between the Sahara and the Himalayas...and having seen his portfolio of photographs, I believe him. He just returned from an overland road trip from Slovenia to Nepal via Senegal (Dakar to Katmandu), which took him 13 months of living and photographing out of a 4x4 Nissan Patrol.

For 20 years, he globe-trotted the world capturing the personality and grandeur of indigenous people and places, and found the time to be awarded many prizes, and recognized in various venues and exhibitions. He traveled in Yemen, Mali, Tibet, North and West Africa, Iran, Mongolia, China, Nepal and India.

I particularly liked his lovely Earth Temples portfolio, which consists of over 60 photographs of various temples, places of worship and still (or silent) places in India, Tibet, Morocco, Bolivia, Nepal and Kenya...to name but a few. These are so beautiful that I wish they were twice the size to appreciate them even better.

The Sabarimala Pilgrimage: Asim Rafiqui

Photo © Asim Rafiqui-All Rights Reserved
It's always a pleasure to start off the month with a super interesting post.

Here's a religious event/festival that not only fires up my adrenaline and imagination, but whose descriptive details I savor with relish, particularly as these are written by one of my favorite writers, William Dalrymple, and photographed by one of my favorite photojournalists, Asim Rafiqui.

And naturally, this event (as one of the largest pilgrimage festival in southern India) will be added to my list of possible destinations for a photo~expedition in 2011 or beyond. Not as overhyped as the Kumbh melas, it's the sort of authentic event I would love to photograph and attend...and then produce photo-essays and audio slideshows. It is this kind of destination that I seek for my photo~expeditions, which are destination/event-driven rather than just hopscotching from one tourist spot to the other. The trek up to the temple takes a minimum of five hours on a crowded path and unfortunately, women aged 10-60 are excluded from the pilgrimage.

The festival is the Sabarimala pilgrimage, and it brings Hindus and Muslims together in a fashion that is seldom witnessed. It would be redundant for me to re-post what Dalrymple describes, so here is his article as published in The Guardian.

Here's Asim's post in his opus; The Idea of India, and in which he writes:

"Here, in this small town in Western Kerala, members of two communities have managed, through legend, lore and ritual, to create a shared spiritual and social space and bridged what many claim is an insurmountable divide. The Sabarimala pilgrimage, in the course of about forty days, will bring nearly 50 million pilgrims through this town, and to the Vavar mosque. The seventy kilometer trek from Erumeli to the mountain top shrine of the god Ayyappa at Sabarimala cannot be completed without first paying respects to his friend the Muslim pirate/saint Vavar and asking his permission to proceed."

Asim meets a guruswami who invites him to join his group to Sabarimala and, being of a different persuasion, assumes wrongly that the invitation was only rhetorical. As the guru leads his group towards the mountain shrine of Ayyappa, he waves and tells Asim that perhaps Ayyappan did not call him yet, but that when he was ready he'd ask him to come.

I hope Ayyapan includes me as well.

My Work: Baneshwar Pind Daan

One of the highlights during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ was a few days spent photographing in Baneshwar during its annual fair, or mela.

The Baneshwar mela is popular tribal gathering held in the Dungarpur district in south Rajasthan. The gathering is followed by a fair held at a small delta formed by the river Soma and Mahi. It's a relatively modest event, without the hype and the attendance of the Kumbh Melas, but it's nevertheless a deeply religious gathering with simple and traditional rituals. Bhil and Garasia tribals come from the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to offer prayers to Lord Shiva, to perform pind daan, and to socialize.

Here's Baneshwar: Pind Daan, an audio-slideshow of photographs made and ambient sound gathered during the mela. Photographed in a documentary style, I chose to process the images in black & white despite their vivid colors.

The audio-slideshow was featured in my March email newsletter sent to my subscribers.

Karim Sahai: India

Karim Sahai is a photographer and feature films digital visual effects based in Wellington, New Zealand. Born in Guadeloupe, he worked on blockbusters such as Avatar, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, among others.

I was hoping that his portfolio would include a wide variety of photographs from his birth country, but unfortunately he has only posted 5 images of Guadeloupe, a magnificent archipelago located in the eastern Caribbean Sea. Hopefully, more will be shown.

Maynard Switzer: Dogon Mask Dances

Photo © Maynard Switzer -All Rights Reserved
Maynard Switzer has recently returned from Mali, where he attended and photographed a Dogon mask dance. These dances are performed at several times during the year, and serve to celebrate the start of the rainy seasons to bring about abundant rainfall, at the end of the harvest seasons to ensure plentiful crops, and also as funerary rituals to commemorate the dead.

Photo © Maynard Switzer -All Rights Reserved
The dances involve dozens of dancers representing figures from the animal world, male and female powers, and the after-world, while the masks represent spirits, women, midwives, witchdoctors, snakes, antelopes and other various representations.

Maynard tells me that the masks are made by boys as part of their coming of age. No outsider is allowed to see the dancers get dressed & put on their masks. The older men are dressed in dark blue, and are retired former dancers who train the new dancers.

Photo © Maynard Switzer -All Rights Reserved
The Dogon are an ethnic group living in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend near the city of Bandiagara in the Mopti region. They are best known for their mythology, their mask dances, wooden sculpture and their architecture.

Maynard Switzer was previously featured here on this blog.

Sharon Johnson-Tennant: Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat

Photo © Sharon Johnson-Tennant -All Rights Reserved
Here are three photographs by Sharon Johnson-Tennant, one of the participants in my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo~Expedition, which I think exemplify her distinctive multi-faceted photographic style.

Photo © Sharon Johnson-Tennant -All Rights Reserved
Sharon is a published photographer, who has traveled and trekked to various corners of the world, on remote expeditions and private explorations in the pursuit of uncommon cultures, unusual places and off the beaten path experiences. Her travels have taken her to Malaysia, Burma, Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and the Philippines. Her work has been published in various Los Angeles galleries, by Sony Pictures and featured in the movie "Hitch".

Photo © Sharon Johnson-Tennant -All Rights Reserved
According to her artist's statement, she's an absolute purist in her photography...she does not crop nor does she alter her images. Sharon finds that the simplest of visions often convey the true beauty and spirit of a person and place. This rings a chord with me, as I am a purist in my photography as well, and cropping (if not in camera) is a talent which I do not posses.

I would add that Sharon's professional background in textile design and international fashion influences her photographic acuity to the point that during our trip, I frequently wondered at what she was photographing so intently in an isolated spot. Now I know what she saw and what I didn't.

Aaron Huey: Mali's Dogon Country

Photo © Aaron Huey/NY Times -All Rights Reserved
The New York Times features a slideshow of Aaron Huey's photographs of the Dogon area of Mali. The Dogon, one of Africa's most isolated ethnic groups, live in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend near the city of Bandiagara in the Mopti region. The population is estimated at between 400,000 to 800,000.

The Dogon are best known for their mythology, their mask dances, wooden sculpture and their architecture. Partly because Dogon country is one of Mali's major tourist attractions, there has seen significant changes in their social structure, culture and belief system.

Joshua Hammers' accompanying article makes a great read, especially as it is spiced with passages such as this one:

"As we prowled around this Flintstones-like world, my photographer colleague wandered off alone. Suddenly I heard a burst of agitated voices, followed by the sight of the photographer, his three cameras dangling from his neck, racing down an alley with a half-dozen Dogon men close behind. He had ventured into a temple used for animal sacrifice, and his presence, as the Dogons saw it, had grievously polluted the site."

Aaron Huey's photographs are mostly of Tellem burial caves in the Bandiagara cliffs, but a few are of the Dogon people themselves. However, Aaron has a blog in which he features more of his Dogon photographs as published in the Smithsonian magazine.

Clive Evans: Morocco

Timeless Morocco - Images by Clive Evans

Born in England, Clive travels the world (especially Europe) from his homes in Southern France and Ireland. His years of traveling and documenting Europe and its people result in images expressing individuals, their cultures, and their environments--often with a visual twist.

Clive is also a founder member of Lumen, an international photographer's cooperative with members in Norway, France, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany and Estonia.

His website, hosted by Photoshelter, has 20 galleries but I chose the one of Morocco, which usually provides enormous difficulties to street photographers wishing to capture its people. One of the photographs in the gallery (#5) perfectly expresses the reaction of people when a photographer attempts to take their picture. However, in many cases the reaction is not as good-humored.

From looking at Clive's well composed photographs of Chefchaouen, I realized that the slideshow seems to have somewhat washed out the colors of the photographs, since Chefchaouen's blue is not as vivid as I've seen them in others.

Aaron Joel Santos: Vietnam

Photo © Aaron Joel Santos -All Rights Reserved
Aaron Joel Santos is a freelance editorial, travel and documentary photographer based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His photographs have been published in a number of international magazines, as well as galleries in the United States, Vietnam and Malaysia. He was an attendee in the 2009 Eddie Adams Workshop.

via The Click.

Alfredo Bini: Monlan Festival

Alfredo Bini has always taken photographs, and found his own personal form of expression in reportage photography. He concentrates on documenting stories of social relevance, and hopes that his images increases public awareness on these issues.

I thought of featuring Alfredo's work of the Monlan festival at the time when China is publicly positioning the Panchen Lama as the legitimate representative of Tibetan Buddhism, and to undermine the popularity of Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama.

Monlam is also known as The Great Prayer Festival, falls on 4th-11th day of the 1st Tibetan month. It is greatest religious festival in Tibet, when thousands of monks gather to perform religious rituals at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.

Alfredo's reportage "Water and Land in Sahel the case of Burkina Faso", won the title of "Runner-Up" in the "Travel Photo Of The Year", run by The Independent and Wanderlust, and has won 2nd place in the IPA Awards (NYC) for the Political category as well as 2 mentions of honor in the Environmental and Feature Story categories.

His Transmigrations reportage has been published as cover story by the Corriere della Sera Magazine and Alias (Il Manifesto), and has also been published by the BBC and Avvenire.

Mark Coughlan: Ardh Kumbh Mela

Photo © Mark Coughlan -All Rights Reserved
A number of photographers (and others are still on their way) have attended the Ardh Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, despite the restrictions on those who didn't have a Journalist visa and press credentials.

I am told that the restrictions were only applied on the main bathing ghat, and that there were ample opportunities to photograph the spectacular characters who attend such religious gatherings, and who I described (during the Maha Kumbh Mela in 2001) as "ascetics, mendicants, mystics, beggars and charlatans".

Mark Coughlan has just posted his work from the Haridwar Kumbh Mela on his website Image The Earth, which documents the fervor of the devout Hindus who traveled for miles and days to attend it, as well as the colorful characters that make the Kumbh Melas what they are.

Mark is a photographer, backpacker, and world traveler based in London. He has traveled to Myanmar, Mongolia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Bolivia among others. He tells us that he likes his photographs to be of vivid colors...he succeeded with his perfect portrait of the sadhu.