The Colors of Italy

My exhibition in Rome at the Museum of Contemporary Art opened December 3, 2011 and will run through April 29, 2012.
As part of the exhibition planning I spent several months photographing locations all over Italy.
Here are a few of those pictures.

Venice, Italy 

 

A man who has not been to Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

 -  Samuel Johnson

 

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.
-  Giuseppe Verdi 

 

Rome, Italy

Open my heart and you will see,
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
-  Robert Browning

Sicily, Italy 

Gubbio, Italy

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery—
back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again
after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.
- D.H.Lawrence

Venice, Italy

Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.
-  William Shakespeare

 

Rome, Italy

Perugia, Italy

Venice, Italy

Camino, Italy

In Italy
by
Derek Walcott
Published in the New Yorker Magazine

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time. Light
older than wine and a cloud like a tablecloth
spread for lunch under the leaves …
April 21, 2008

Camino, Italy

Sicily, Italy

 MACRO Testaccio Pelanda
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4
ROME

December 3, 2011 – April 29, 2012

EXHIBITION WEBSITE: 
http://www.stevemccurryroma.it/allestimento.php?lang=eng

Venice, Italy

If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country [Italy] its music.
This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism .
- Thomas Jefferson

Spoleto, Perugia

Italy is a dream that keeps returning
for the rest of your life.
- Anna Akhmatova

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

Some Media coverage of the Rome Exhibition:

http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/art-photo-design/2011/12/steve-mccurry

http://www.video.mediaset.it/video/tg5/tg5_la_lettura/265739/steve-mccurry.html

More Fun and Games

Wodaabe Tribe, Niger

Laughter is by definition healthy.
- Doris Lessing,  Nobel Laureate in Literature

La Fortuna, Honduras

Shanghai Circus, Shanghai, China 

Moscow, Russia 

Perugia, Italy

If music be the food of love, play on.
- William Shakespeare

Havana, Cuba

India

Rajasthan, India

Lucknow, India

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
- W. H. Auden

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

Mersin, Turkey 

Could we look into the head of a Chess player,
we should see there a whole world of feelings,
images, ideas, emotion and passion.
- Alfred Binet

Jodhpur, India

Peru

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Some people believe football is a matter of
life and death.
I’m very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
- Bill Shankly, English soccer manager.

Maningrida, Australia

Tibet

Young Shepherd during Holi, Rajasthan, India

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
- Immanual Kant

Istanbul, Turkey

Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
- Anatole France

Mumbai/Bombay, India

 

Buzkashi, Kabul, Afghanistan

Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

They say golf is like life, but don’t believe them.
Golf is more complicated than that.
- Gardner Dickinson

Bangladesh

 

Yemen

 

You must invent your own games and
teach us old ones how to play.
- Nikki Giovanni

Burma/Myanmar

Varanasi, India

Fun and Games

 

Tibetan Refugee Settlement, Bylakuppe, India

 

 

 

 

  

Tibet

 

 

If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed

himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become
unstable without knowing it.
– Herodotus

 

 Lhasa, Tibet

 

The true object of all human life is play.
Earth is a task garden.
Heaven is a playground.
G . K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

Gubbio, Italy

 

 

 

Burma/Myanmar

 

You can discover more about a person in an
hour of play than in a year of conversation.
– Plato

Tokyo, Japan

 

 Spoleto, Italy

 

Mumbai, India

 

 Rajasthan, India

 

Play is a uniquely adaptive act,
not subordinate to some other adaptive
act, but with a special function of its own
in human experience.
– Johan Huizinga

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 Wrestling Match, Kahan, Afghanistan

 

Los Angeles, California

Games lubricate the body and the mind.
-Benjamin Franklin

 

Nova Scotia, Canada

 

Play is the exultation of the possible.
– Martin Buber

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

  Bangladesh

 

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the
seriousness of a child at play.
– Heraclitus

Mumbai, India

 

 China

It is requisite for the relaxation of the mind that we make use,
from time to time, of playful deeds and jokes.
– Thomas Aquinas

  Bamiyan, Afghanistan

 

 

Myanmar/Burma

 

 

Rajasthan, India

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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

Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words

Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, Rangoon, Myanmar/Burma

 Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old,
rich and poor, reading books.
Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular,
they are, for a time, transported to  another world.

Myanmar/Burma

Ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press which enabled
everyone access to books, artists have tried to portray the relationship of readers and books.

Myanmar/Burma

Garrett Stewart’s book, The Look of Reading:
Book, Painting, Text, explores the relationship of
reading and art.He points out that a wide array of artists from Rembrandt to  Picasso and Cassatt
and dozens more,over the past 500 years
have painted people reading and the “look of reading” on the subjects’ faces.

Shanghai, China

Rome, Italy

Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy

Chiang Mai, Thailand

  We are familiar with words describing images, but not so
familiar with images describing words and the
impact reading has on our lives.

Istanbul, Turkey

Reading a good book is a universal activity,
and people read while they do just about everything else.

Afghan soldier takes cover from bombardment at Kandahar Airport

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
formerly Victoria Terminus, Mumbai/Bombay, India

Ujjian, India

We read to know we are not alone.
- C.S. Lewis

Havana, Cuba

Lourdes, France

Washington Square Park, New York

Venice, Italy

Rome, Italy

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Istanbul, Turkey

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
- Emily Dickinson

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 –Extended to October 15, 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 – December 14, 2011

LAURA RATHE FINE ART

Houston, TX

September 17 – October 15, 2011

MACRO
Museum of Contemporary Art
Rome, Italy
December 1, 2011 – April 29, 2012

Unpublished, Unseen VI

Istanbul, Turkey

 Over the past thirty years, I have taken nearly a million pictures. 
Many of them have been published in my books, in magazines, and
seen in my exhibitions,but a majority have never been seen.
Here are a few of those unseen pictures.

Baluchistan, Pakistan

Sicily, Italy

Tibet

 

Yemen

Lhasa, Tibet

Afghanistan 

Gujarat, India

Mizoram, India

Japan

Havana, Cuba

Havana, Cuba

Bangkok, Thailand

Chang Mai, Thailand

Italy

Cape Town, South Africa

Kali Gandaki, Nepal

India

 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 – December 14, 2011

LAURA RATHE FINE ART

September 17 – October 15

Houston, TX

MACRO
Museum of Contemporary Art
Rome, Italy
December 1, 2011 – April 29, 2012

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

 

On and Off the Wall

Street Art | Graffiti, Murals, Posters, and Signs

 

Inside a bell at a pilgrimage site, Mingun, Myanmar/Burma

 

Graffiti has existed since ancient Greece and Rome.  It expresses political and cultural views, and many consider it an art form.

 

 

Myanmar/Burma

 

 

Havana, Cuba

 

When there are cultural and political shifts, it is sometimes possible to see the earliest indications  by literally looking at the “writing on the wall.”

 

 

Havana, Cuba

 

 

Berlin, Germany

 

 Posters are found in public places all over the world. They are  designed to attract the attention of passers-by and entice them to purchase a particular product or service, make them aware of a political viewpoint, or attend a specific event. If suddenly it were decreed that they all must disappear, it would seem that all color had disappeared from the urban landscape, and the cities would appear a mournful gray.
- Max Gallo

 

 

Poster Studio, Mumbai/Bombay, India

 

 

Venice, Italy 

 

 

Anand, Gujarat, India

 

 

Dentist’s Clinic, Ujjain, India 

 

 

New York, NY

 

 Throughout the world there have been murals on walls as long as there have been people to scratch them, paint them, etch them, carve them and make them.

 

New York, NY 

 

 

Street art on the pavement at Seventh Avenue & Bleecker Street, New York
 

 

From the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, France, to the ceremonial and celebratory murals of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome,
India, and Mesopotamia, the history of murals is long,  rich and varied.
  

 

Los Angeles, California

 

  Ancient murals often depicted activities in which the people of the time engaged, from religious ceremonies to
scenes of hunting and gathering for sustenance.
- Kaizaad Kotwal

 

Mujahid, Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Kunduz, Afghanistan

 

 

Young men admiring Movie Poster, Pul-i-Khumri, Afghanistan 

 

 

Poster Vendor, Kabul, Afghanistan 

 

 Posters are mirrors because they reflect and sometimes distort the culture and the customs of the time. 
- Max Gallo

 

 

Metro Station, Paris, France

Nice piece in PhotoShelter blog:
http://blog.photoshelter.com/2011/07/steve-mccurry-the-iconic-photographs-unboxing.html

 

 

Gatherings, Protests, and Celebrations

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts …
- William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”

 

Young Monks at Tashi Lhunpr, Xigaze, Tibet

 

New York City, USA

 

Croatia

 

Via Condotti, Rome, Italy

 

Mumbai/Bombay, India

 

Druze elders, Lebanon

 

Debating Monks at Bylakuppe, Karnataka, India

 

One of Mumbai’s laughing clubs, India

 

Peshawar, Pakistan

 

Kashmir

 

Shia Mosque, Kabul, Afghanistan

 

Rajasthan, India

 

Monsoon Festival, Kathmandu, Nepal

 

 

Kumbh Mela Festival, India

It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.
- Mark Twain

Temporary pontoon bridges across the Ganges River help to facilitate movement of some of the thirty million Hindu devotees who will take part in the Kumbh Mela Festival,  Allahabad, India.

 

Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India

Thrissur Pooram is the most extravagent and colorful festival in Kerala.  Attended by tens of thousands of devotees, the festivities include dozens of caparisoned elephants.  These Indian elephants are loved, revered, groomed, and given a prestigious place in the state’s culture.

Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India

 

Ganesh Chaturthi festival, Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai, India

 

Yangon, Burma/Myanmar during the Thingyan Festival

 

Jokhang Palace,  Lhasa, Tibet

 

Niger

 

These young Wadabi men are taking part in the Garawal, an annual marriage ritual performed by the tribe. In this event, dramatic make-up is applied to the faces of the men, who dance and make exaggerated expressions in an attempt to attract new brides.

 

 

 

 

A Matter of Faith

 Girl praying at a mosque, Kabul,  Afghanistan

 

 I have seen many manifestations of  faith during my travels over the past three decades.  Some have been spontaneous, some have been part of a liturgy, some have been prescribed rituals, some have been in magnificent buildings, others have been outside under a tree.   Some people’s faith is embedded in the way they live their lives.

 

 

 

Shaolin monks training, Zhengzhou, China

 

“Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith.”   Mohandas Gandhi

 

 

Prayers and teaching, Peshawar, Pakistan

 

 

 

 Sikh holiest site, Golden Temple,  Amritsar, India

 

 

 

 

Sri Lanka

 

 

 

Prayer Flags, Lhasa, Tibet

 

 

 

Charlotte, North Carolina

 

 

 Religious Instruction – Jewish child  in Yemen

 

 

 

Srinagar, Kashmir

 

 

 

Brazil

 

 

Camino, Italy

 

 

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.  To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”   

- St. Thomas Aquinas

 

 

India

 

 

Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India

 

  “Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.”

    - Rabindranath Tagore

 

                                                                       

Tibetan Prayer Festival in Bodh Gaya, India

 

 

Pilgrim praying with monks at the Buddhist Academy of Larung Gar, Kham Province, Tibet

 

“What is Faith?  When your good deed pleases you and your evil deed grieves you, you are a believer.”

- Prophet Muhammad

 

Monk at Jokhang temple, Lhasa, Tibet