Grief, Grind, and Glory of Work

Last month the world heard the tragic news
that more than a thousand people working at a clothing factory in Bangladesh,
were killed when the factory they were working in collapsed.

Burma

The appetite for cheap clothing in the West is insatiable.
The people making the clothing  often pay the true cost of these items.
The scale of this factory in Burma is vast.
The sense that these workers are just part of an immense machine is
accentuated by the pink shirts they are obliged to wear.

Burma

Labor disgraces no man;
unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.  
- Ulysses S. Grant

Yemen

Whether it is men fishing,  nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or 
working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them,
there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.  

Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters.  Java, Indonesia

Shoe repair shop in India

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
- Horace

Burma

India

Your life is a journey, not a rest.
You are travelling to the promised land, from the cradle to the grave.
The Sunday at Home, December 7th 1854

Candy Factory, Kabul, Afghanistan

Mumbai, India

Gujarat, India

All happiness depends on courage and work.
- Honore de Balzac

Miners search for gems.  Hindu Kush, Afghanistan

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MKS Steelworks, Serbia

Japan

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Landi Kotal, Pakistan

Bakery run by Afghan widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

Croatia

Many find their identity in the work they do. Some enjoy intense satisfaction in their work.
For others, the line between work and play is hard to find.

India

           Mumbai, India

Sugar cane farmer, Philippines

Everything yields to diligence.
- Thomas Jefferson

Drying coffee beans, Brazil

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or
Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of
heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.  
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Flower Seller, Dal Lake, Kashmir

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Right as Rain

During the year I shot the monsoon assignment, I learned to see it as a critically important event, 
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.
Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience
as they watch their fields come back to life after being parched for half the year.

Varanasi, India 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s annual monsoon rains have arrived at the southern Kerala coast,
a top weather official said on Tuesday, brightening prospects of higher farm output by aiding
farmers to plant summer-sown crops such as rice, soybean and cotton on time.
- June 6, 2012

Goa, India

Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending to the earth …
– John Updike

India

For half the world’s people, good monsoons, those rain-bearing winds of
Asia and the Subcontinent,  mean life and prosperity.
Poor ones are marked by famine and death.

Bangladesh

The rains fall on one horn of the buffalo, and not on the other.
-Indian Proverb

Kabul, Afghanistan

Java, Indonesia

Nepal

Northern Territory, Australia

Tokyo, Japan

Tibet

It is no use to grumble and complain; It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice.
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain – Why, rain’s my choice.
- James Whitcomb Riley

Sri Lanka

Indonesia

Cambodia

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
- Lucretius

Porbandar, India

India

Dalit women cleaning streets, Mumbai, India

Burma

Only He shakes the heavens and from its treasures takes out the winds.
He joins the waters and the clouds and produces the rain. He does all those things.
- Michael Servetus (1511-1553)
Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer

Cambodia

Monsoon History
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The air is wet, soaks
into mattresses, and curls
In apparitions of smoke,
Like fat white slugs furled
Among the timber
Or silver fish tunnelling
The damp linen covers
Of schoolbooks, or walking
Quietly like centipedes,
The air walking everywhere
On its hundred feet
Is filled with the glare
Of tropical water.
Again we are taken over
By clouds and rolling darkness.
Small snails appear
Clashing their timid horns
Among the morning glory
Vines.

Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia

Monsoon Festival, India

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Two men try to cross a monsoon swollen river after the bridge was swept away, Goa, 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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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

The Power of Nature

 Please scroll to the bottom for the Unpublished Portrait of the Week

Japan

Japan

The word tsunami comes from two Japanese words: tsu, which means harbor, and nami, which means wave.

  Japan

Japan

 In March  2011, Japan suffered from one of most violent earthquakes in history. 

Japan

 Its coastline shifted by as much thirteen feet to the east.

Japan

 The tsunami spawned by the earthquake destroyed virtually everything in its wake.

Japan

Duckweed carpets the water in a girl’s front yard at Bojonegoro, Java, Indonesia

Covering the monsoons  entailed day after day wallowing in filthy
water up to my chest, or standing in the street in a torrential downpour, my shoulder aching from the umbrella
propped in my armpit, and an impatient assistant wishing he were somewhere else.

Porbandar, Gujarat, India

I spent four days, in the flooded city of Gujarat, India, wading around the streets in waist-deep water that was filled with
bloated animal carcasses and other waste material.

Porbandar, Gujarat, India

The fetid water enveloped me leaving a greasy film over my
clothes and body.  Every night I returned to my flooded hotel,
empty except for a nightwatchman, and bathed my shriveled feet in disinfectant.

Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, India

Goa, India

 Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans in August  2005,  was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States.
Almost two thousand people died in the hurricane and the flood which followed.

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans, United States

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

On December 26, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries.

 Four days after the tsunami hit Sri Lanka’s coastline
A man prays for the victims 

UNSEEN / UNPUBLISHED PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK

 Texas, United States 

Please visit Steve’s main site:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

Between Darkness and Light

 

 

 Kampala, Uganda

 

 

 Shadows:  The places between darkness and light

 

 

Cambodia

 

 

“Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter’s day, how beautiful the shadows are. 
  Alas!  It is the nature of their kind to be so. 
The lovliest things in life are but shadows, and they come and go, and change and fade away…”
- Charles Dickens 

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

  

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Afghanistan

 

 

 

Burma/Myanmar

 

 

 

Cambodia

 

 

 

Bodh Gaya, India

 

 

 

 

Girl peeks out a train window, India

 

 

 

Mud Mosque, Mali

 

 

 

After the earthquake and tsunami, Japan, 2011 

 

 

 

Philippines

 

 

Vietnam

 

 

Vietnam

 

 

Croatia

 

 

 

Grand Central Terminal, New York

 

 

 

Train Station, Old Delhi, India 

 

 

 ”The Sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building.”

Louis Kahn, Architect
quoted in the forward of  the book,
In Praise of Shadows,  Junichiro Tanizaki

 

 

 

Cambodia

 

 

  Marseilles, France

 

 

Jalalabad, Afghanistan 

 

 

The Eye of the Beholder

 

 The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, are two of the world’s most iconic buildings.   They both evoke passionate emotions, even love, despite being  on opposite ends of the historical and architectural spectrum. 

 

 

Taj Mahal, Agra, India
Built with translucent white marble and inlaid with gems from China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Arabian peninsula

 

 In both buildings shape, size, scale, proportion, texture, color, and light  work together to spectacular effect, but very simple structures can also be designed to bring aesthetic pleasure.

 

 

Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain
Constructed with a steel frame covered with titanium sheathing

 

What makes things pleasing to our eyes, and how can the design of everything from majestic buildings to simple utilitarian structures bring delight?

 

 

Kyoto, Japan

 

For centuries, there has been documented evidence that people have preferences for structures in the built environment and in the natural environment that have certain geometric  proportions known as the golden ratio or golden proportion. 

 

 

Red Fort, New Delhi, India

  

  The ratio of length to width of approximately 1.618  appears not only in art and architecture, but also in natural structures.

 

 

Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet

 

 

 

 

Junagarh Fort, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

 

 

 

Step Well, India

 

 

Kimberly Elam’s book,  Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition, points out that things in nature as different as
the human body, the pine cone, and the trout all share natural proportioning systems that provide the foundation for all art, architecture, and design.

 

 

Summer Palace, Beijing, China

 

 

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is

recognition of the pattern. 
 - Alfred North Whitehead, Mathemetician

 

 

Jodhpur, India

 

  

Gujarat, India

 

 

 Jaipur, India, 2008

 

 

 On photography and geometry:

“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.” 
- Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

 

“Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors.”  -  Plato