The Greatest Good

Niger

Music
The greatest good that mortals know
and all of heaven we have below.
- Joseph Addison

Yemen

Rocca Paolina, Perugia, Umbria, Italy 

Chitral, Pakistan

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Street Musician, Dublin, Ireland 

 Honduras

La Habana Vieja, Cuba

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
- Leo Tolstoy

A family plays music on the street hoping for a few rupees, India

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Berthold Auerbach

Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia

Two musicians practice for the Jazz Festival, Perugia, Italy

Music’s the medicine of the mind. 
- John A. Logan

 France

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
- Leonard Bernstein

 Kashmir

Herbie Hancock, Italy
Winner of 14 Grammy Awards, Hancock is a musical icon.

 Kalash Girl, Chitral District of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan

 When words leave off, music begins.
- Heinrich Heine

Khan Murjan restaurant in a 14th century building which
served as an inn for travellers and traders.  Baghdad, Iraq

Whiskey a Go Go, a fixture on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, California, United States

Pianist waits to perform in a supper club, Shanghai, China

Alto Churumazu, Peru

 Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
- Alphonse de Lamartine

Marrakesh, Morocco

Traditional performers,  Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California

Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you,
music itself is not going to let you down.
- Virgil Thomson, Composer, Winner of the Pulitzer Price, 1949

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Seal  greets Steve McCurry at concert, PhotoKina,Cologne, Germany
Courtesy of Matthias Krug,  September 17, 2012

CURRENT AND FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

Oeksnehallen, Copenhagen, Denmark – Ongoing
Gallery N, Seoul Arts Centre, Seoul, South Korea – Opening on September 12th, 2012
Leica Photokina, Hall 1, Cologne, Germany – September 18, 2012
Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – October 6th, 2012
Plazzo Ducale, Genova, Italy – October 17, 2012
Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles – November 15, 2012
Chris Beetles Gallery, London, U.K. – January 15, 2013
Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg, Germany – January 19, 2013
Cavalier Gallery, Greenwich, CT – April 12 – May 6, 2013
Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland – June 1, 2013

Simple Act of Waiting

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
-Khaled Hosseini,  A Thousand Splendid Suns 

Tibet

Often the act of waiting is anything but simple.
Many people hate to wait because they are waiting to do something,
get something, or go somewhere.

Tibet

Waiting doesn’t seem like an act, but the lack of action;  however,
the decision to be patient and willing to wait is an act of courage and perseverance.

Crowds at the Kumbh Mela await their turn to bathe in the Ganges.  Allahabad, India

A person who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
- George Savile

Waiting for medical care. Kabul, Afghanistan

A mother waits for news of her missing son.  Afghanistan

Refugees wait in line.  Thailand

Endurance is patience concentrated.
- Thomas Carlyle

Women queue in Yemen

 Patience is the companion of wisdom.
- St. Augustine

A ballerina waits backstage for her cue. Zagreb, Croatia

Shoppers wait for a bus. Dublin, Ireland

The faithful wait for healing. Lourdes, France 

Waiting in line for a church service. Los Angeles, USA 

Waiting for the train.  India

Waiting for a bus. Ahmedabad, India

Waiting for a look through the Berlin Wall.  Germany

Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.
- Virgil

Waiting to perform. Hong Kong, China

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.
- French Proverb

Waiting for customers at Amber Fort, Jaipur, India

Dog waits for door to open. Porbandar, India

The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider
… I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.

Cambodia

It Takes Two

 Here are some pictures of couples all over
the world who have a relationship that is
evident in their gestures of caring, their body
language, their eyes.

Mauritania

If we are a metaphor of the universe,
the human couple is the metaphor par excellence,
the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.
The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Havana, Cuba

Brazil

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Venice, Italy

What is essential is invisible to the eye.
 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Rome, Italy

Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be, the last of life,
for which the first was made.
Our times are in his hand who saith,
A whole I planned, youth shows but half;
Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!
– Robert Browning

France

 

New York City

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

Life has taught us that love does not
consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward
together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Wind, Sand, and Stars

Tagong, Tibet

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
– Robert Browning

Gostivar, Macedonia

 

Agra, India

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. 
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Uganda

To love someone deeply gives you strength.
Being loved by someone  deeply gives you courage.
- Lao-Tzu

Sanaa, Yemen

 

Dublin, Ireland

 

Belgrade, Serbia

One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life.
That word is love.
– Sophocles

Rome, Italy

 

Istanbul, Turkey

Cambodia

 

Rome, Italy

The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature

The Firmest Friend

 The poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend.
- Lord Byron

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

Dogs are our link to paradise.
They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be
back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring.
It was peace.
- Milan Kundera

 

Ireland

 

Kham, Eastern Tibet

 

Varanasi, India

The dog … is the god of frolic.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Angkor, Cambodia

New Delhi, India

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

With eye upraised his master’s look to scan,
The joy, the solace, and the aid of man:
The rich man’s guardian and the poor man’s friend,
The only creature faithful to the end.
- George Crabbe

Porbandar, India

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
- Konrad Lorenz

Bagan, Burma

 

Rome, Italy

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who
returned home after being absent for more than twenty years
and was recognized only by his dog.
- Guillermo C. Infante

Marseille, France

Vietnam

India

 

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have
known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
- James Thurber

Texas, USA

Histories are more full of the examples
of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
- Alexander Pope

India

Bhutan

Jaipur, India

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers,
is contained in the dog.
Franz Kafka, Investigations of the Dog

Near Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

 

Rome, Italy

California, USA

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in
this selfish world, the one that never deserts him,
the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.
- George Graham

Paraguay

If you think you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
-  Cowboy Wisdom

 

Gruffy, our family dog, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania

We invite you to visit our new website:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

Coming of Age

 All of living is a process of coming of age, of reconciling
the essence of the inner self with one’s outer being,with the world, and with
changing expectations for that self in the world.
- Kay E. Vandergrift

Rome, Italy

The teen and young adult years, when young people are perched precariously on the brink between childhood and
adult responsibilities, are, of course, when the coming of age process is most obvious.
- K.E.V.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Tanzania

Los Angeles, USA

The imagination of a boy is healthy,
and the mature imagination of a man is healthy;
but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment,
the character undecided, the way of life uncertain,
the ambition thick-sighted.
 -  John Keats

Havana, Cuba

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition

- Theodore Roethke

Gubbio, Italy

Germany

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
- Abraham Lincoln

Kabul, Afghanistan

Budapest, Hungary

 

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect,
he becomes an adolescent;
the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult;
the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
- Alden Nolan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Dublin, Ireland

We don’t stop playing because we grow old.
We grow old because we stop playing.
- George Bernard Shaw

Italy

Flechtingen, Germany

Zabid, Yemen

Germany

 

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh — at yourself.
- Ethel Barrymore

La Fortuna, Honduras

Honduras

 

Zagreb, Croatia

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and
while they are trying to work out who they are as people,  never mind as a dancer.
So train the whole person, not just the dancer.
- Deborah Bull

Tibet

Passage

Young man,
Young woman,
Life turns for you.
This is a magic time,
a mythic passage,
In your becoming
We who welcome you,
None of us is too old
So as to have forgotten
–the mystery of not
knowing,
–the delight of first
discovery,
–the impatience to hurry
what will come next
–the terrible wonderfulness
of the changes…
-Edward Searl

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

The Power of Two

I have always been interested in the ways that people around the world share things in common.  All of those things remind us of what the human condition is really about.  In the blogs that I wrote about reading, we saw that there is a strong connection between people and their books which is the same in Yemen as it is in China as it is in France as it is in Thailand as any other place on the planet.  The relationship between people and their books goes all the way back to the invention of the printing press.

The subject of this blog goes back millennia.  Here are some pictures of couples who have a relationship that is evident in their gestures of caring, their body language, in their eyes.

Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

Tagong, Kham, Tibet

Gostivar, Macedonia

Agra, India

Nouakchott, Mauritania

Lourdes, France

Kampala, Uganda

Sanaa, Yemen

After the ball, Dublin, Ireland

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Belgrade, Serbia