Where We Live

 

 Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
- Charles Dickens

 Yemen

 Home is where the heart is.
Pliny The Elder,  A.D. 23-79

Mali 

 Kashmir

Philippines

 The home should be the treasure chest of living.
- Le Corbusier

 Morocco

Mauritania

 Afghanistan

  

It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.
- Rumi, (Jalal Al-Din Rumi, 1207 – 1273)

 Tibet

 Tibet

 Tibet

 One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.
- Margaret Mead

 South Africa

Sri Lanka

 Philippines 

What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts
are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the
head and heart?
- Orison Swett Marden

Peru

La Fortuna, Honduras

Bring love into your home for this is where our
love for each other must start.
- Mother Teresa

 Nepal 

 Paraguay 

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
-  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Afghanistan

My home…It is my retreat and resting place from wars,
I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest
outside, as I do another corner in my soul.
- Michel Eyquem De Montaigne, 1533 – 1592

 Philippines 

Home is any four walls that enclose the right people. 
- Helen Rowland

 Kashmir

 Pakistan

Every one of us needs a home. The world needs a home.
There are so many young people who are homeless.
They may have a building to live in, but they are homeless in their hearts.
That is why the most important practice
of our time is to give each person a home.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

 Ireland

 Italy

 

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home…

- John Howard Payne

U P C O M I N G   E X H I B I T I O N S

CHRIS BEETLES FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHS
3-5 Swallow Street
London W1B 4DE
September 7 – 24, 2011

PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY
2525 Michigan Ave #A1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
September 10 – December 1, 2011

 

OPEN SHUTTER GALLERY
735 Main Avenue
Durango, CO
September 9 – October 21, 2011

  

MACRO
Museum of Contemporary Art
Rome, Italy
December 1, 2011 – May 1, 2012

Power of Hands

Rome, Italy

Hands are the tools of tools.
-Aristotle

Banteay Srei, Angkor, Cambodia 

 Our hands often reveal what we really think but do not say.
They can show a range of feelings and emotions from confusion and frustration
to joy, understanding, love, and compassion. 

Laughing Club, Mumbai, India

Vietnam

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us,
we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions,or cures, have chosen rather
to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
- Henri Nouwen

Sicily

Faisabad, Afghanistan

Afghanistan

India 

 Hands calm us, feed us, and scratch our backs.  They intimidate, bless, encourage, and stop us.  They soothe and caress.
They draw our attention to the good and the bad, often suggesting exuberance or fear.

- Charles Flowers introduction to Elliott Erwitt’s Handbook

Honduras 

Hong Kong, China 

 Al Ahmadi, Kuwait

Men of ill judgment oft ignore the good That lies within their hands, till they have lost it.
-Sophocles

 Kham, Tibet

 Bangkok,Thailand

 

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as
beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
- Rumi ( 1207 – 1273)

Dublin, Ireland

 

Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and
let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.
- Mother Teresa

Helsinki, Finland

Heart Surgery, Brazil 

Hands

Hands have saved lives and taken them just as easily.
They create the saviors of life as well as the purveyors of death.
Creating and destroying with a single move a finger can move mountains or search the unknown heavens.

Hands live to caress and love.
Hands live to fight and die.
Forever living hands, forever exploring hands.
- Bruce Alan Humphrey

 Kuwait

The Spirit of India

India’s Proverbs and Poems

PROVERBS have been part of every culture for thousands of years. 
Francis Bacon said that the wit, genius, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs. 

It’s difficult to find true love, but even more difficult to find true friendship

 Mumbai

 Goa

One who is walking alone, walks fastest

Rajasthan

Ladakh 

 If you are noble you will find the world noble.

Vrindivan 

 Mumbai

One who believes in his own capabilities, is never unsuccessful

 Goa

You cannot get knowledge without a teacher

 Ladakh 

Jodhpur 

POETRY is the language of the emotions.  Thomas Gray described poetry as thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

You cannot take your boat across the sea
If you are afraid of the waves,
The one who tries
Never fails.
- Harivansh Rai Bachchan 

 Cochin

In the Bazaars of Hyderabad

What do you sell O ye merchants ?
Richly your wares are displayed.
Turbans of crimson and silver,
Tunics of purple brocade,
Mirror with panels of amber,
Daggers with handles of jade.
What do you weigh, O ye vendors?
Saffron and lentil and rice.
What do you grind, O ye maidens?
Sandalwood, henna, and spice.
What do you call , O ye peddlers?
Chessman and ivory dice.

 Jaipur 

What do you make, O ye goldsmiths?
Wristlets and ankles and ring,
Bells for the feet of blue pigeons
Frail as a dragon- fly’s wing,
Girdles of gold for dancers,
Scabbards of gold for the king.

Palace Hotels

What do you cry, O ye fruitmen?
Citron, pomegranate, and plum.
What do you play , O magicians?
Spells for aeons to come.

Rajasthan

What do you weave, O ye flower-girls
With tassels of azure and red?
Crowns for the brow of a bridegroom,
Chaplets to garland his bed,
Sheets of white blossoms new-garnered
To perfume the sleep of the dead.
- Sarojini Naidu

 Rajasthan 

 Darjeeling

In Praise of Trees
O Tree, life-founder, you heard the sun
Summon you from the dark womb of earth
At your life’s first weakening; your height
Raised from rhythmless rock the first
Hymn to the light; you brought feeling to harsh impassive desert…

-Rabindranath Tagore
Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1913
(Translated by Dr. William Radice, 1985)

 Jaipur

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great-grandmother of tradition.
- Mark Twain

 Punjab

Stronger By Weakness

 

Lhasa, Tibet 

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
-Edmund Waller

Gujarat, India

Vrindavan, India

Kham, Tibet

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. 
- Frank Lloyd Wright

 Dubrovnik, Croatia

 Jalalabad, Afghanistan

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
- Garson Kanin

Myanmar/Burma 

Rajasthan, India

 Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Brazil

 Pakistan

 Filadelfia, Paraguay

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
- W. Somerset Maugham

 Sri Lanka

 Cuba 

Warning

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
and satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
and run my stick along the public railings
and make up for the sobriety of my youth…
- Jenny Joseph

  Tibet 

Lhasa, Tibet

Kashmir

France

Grow old along with me.  The best is yet to be. 
- Robert Browning

 

France 

When we’re young we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water.
– Maxwell Anderson