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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The Universal Language

 India

A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
- William Arthur Ward

Tibet

Afghanistan 

A smile is the universal welcome.
- Max Eastman

Burma

Afghanistan

India

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
- Washington Irving

  An Indian tailor caught in the monsoon floodwaters in
Porbandar, India

Look back, and smile on perils past.
- Sir Walter Scott

Afghanistan

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Kashmir

Afghanistan

Cambodia

Every smile makes you a day younger.
- Chinese Proverb

Burma

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night;
a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
– Henry Ward Beecher

China

Honduras

 Tibet

Celebration in Berlin, Germany

Peace begins with a smile.
- Mother Teresa

Afghanistan

Vietnam

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress,
and grows brave by reflection.
– Thomas Paine

Burma

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but
sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Afghanistan

Silent Language of Hands

Afghanistan

Behold the hands
how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, 
refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, 
mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of
variation which makes the tongue envious.
- Michel de Montaigne

Sharbat Gula, Nasir Bagh Refugee Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan

 

Vietnam

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. 

Afghanistan

Among all species, our human hands are unique — not only in what they can accomplish,
but also in how they communicate. Human hands can paint the Sistine Chapel, pluck a guitar,
maneuver surgical instruments, chisel a David, forge steel, and write poetry.
They can grasp, scratch, poke, punch, feel, sense, evaluate, hold and mold the world around us.
- Joe Navarro

Florida, United States

 

New York City, United States

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

Cuba

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

Tibet

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

Mali

 

Kashmir

 

Tibet

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

Afghanistan

To receive everything, one must open one’s hands and give.
- Taisen Deshimaru

Burma

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)

Ireland

 

Japan

Hold a true friend with both hands
- African Proverb

Paraguay

To pray means to open your hands before God.
- Henri Nouwen

United States

 

Kunar Province, Afghanistan

Kunar Province, Afghanistan

Russia

The hands which beckon,
embrace, soothe, and comfort us
Bid us farewell.

Uganda

…For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5
-William Shakespeare

===

 

To Fly

To read is to fly:
it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view
over  wide terrains of history,
human variety, ideas, shared experience and the
fruits of many inquiries.
- A. C. Grayling

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey.
They are home.
- Anna Quindlen

Germany

India 

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,
learned something, become a better person.
Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on…
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
- Nora Ephron

India

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.

Thailand

India

Reading a good book is a universal activity, and people read while they do
just about everything else, and that includes reading while playing the
piano, which my sister used to do.

Sri Lanka

At one magical instant in your early childhood,
the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning.
Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened.
You became, irrevocably, a reader.
- Alberto Manguel

Burma

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Lourdes, France

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends;
they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the
most patient of teachers. 
- Charles William Eliot

Italy

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
- James Russell Lowell

India

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

Tibet

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

China

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still,
retreat or fly into the future.
- Jim Bishop

Thailand

That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book,
and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will
lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive
- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

India

Kashmir

Korea

We live for books.
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

Canada

Turkey

Afghanistan

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo

Italy 

Yemen

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the
most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
- Wisława Szymborska
1996 Nobel Prize in Literature

India

Cuba

Japan

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
- Rene Descartes

Upstairs, Downstairs

Burma

For centuries, stairs have symbolized journeys, rites of passage,
transitions, and stages of  life in art, literature, and music.

Tibet

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
‘Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
- William Butler Yeats

Italy

Stairs are climbed step by step.
- Turkish Proverb

Kashmir

Children’s stories tell tales of boys and girls discovering treasures upstairs in the
attic and fearing what is downstairs in the basement.

Afghanistan

Faith is taking the first step even when
you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Burma

Morocco

India 

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe,
grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts,
emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
- John Steinbeck

Italy

Jodhpur, India

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be
through Earth’s loveliness.
- Michelangelo

Italy

Mt. Popa, Burma
The stairway climbs a 300-foot lava plug crowned by Buddhist temples.

Serbia

Mother to Son
Well, Son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes

New York, September 12, 2001 

Japan 

New York

Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn’t any
other stair
quite like
it.
i’m not at the bottom,
i’m not at the top;
so this is the stair
where
I always
stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!
- A.A. Milne

Italy

Haiku
Steep steps
Uneven treads
Life
- bmv

India 

Iraq 

India 

Afghanistan

Silhouettes and Shadows

Bodh Gaya, India

 The Sun never knew how wonderful it was
until it fell on the wall of a building.
Louis Kahn, Architect
quoted in forward of In Praise of Shadows,  Junichiro Tanizaki

Mud Mosque, Mali

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 loveliest things in life are but shadows,
and they come and go, and change and fade away…
- Charles Dickens

Cambodia

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows,
the light and dark which that thing provides.
- Junichiro Tanizaki

Kabul, Afghanistan

We are but dust and shadow.
- Horace

Preah Khan, Cambodia

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
- J.R. R. Tolkien

Thailand

Burma/Myanmar

Mauritania

Brazil

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
- T. S. Eliot

Italy

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow.
The shadow is what we think of it.  The tree is the real thing.
- Abraham Lincoln

New York

Kandze, Tibet

Burma/Myanmar

Kabul, Afghanistan

China

Kashmir

Korea

Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan

Ancient Catacombs, Rome, Italy

A shadow on the wall
boughs stirred by the noonday wind
that’s enough earth
and for the eye
enough celestial participation.
- Gottfried Benn
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

The Lives We Live

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
- Flora Whittemore

Maimana, Afghanistan

Since the beginning of time, doors have
symbolized both great opportunities and thwarted dreams.

Varanasi, India

Morocco

The open door is a metaphor for new life, a passage
from one stage of life to another, and metamorphosis.
Closed doors represent rejection and exclusion.

Kashmir

The Door
Too little has been said
Of the door,
its one face turned to the night’s
Downpour
and its other
To the shift and glisten of firelight.

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

For doors are both frame and monument
To our spent time,
And too little
Has been said of our
coming through and leaving by them.
- Charles Tomlinson

India

Cambodia

Tibet

A door just opened on a street–
I, lost, was passing by–
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed
And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,–
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
- Emily Dickinson

Kabul, Afghanistan

Mingun Pagoda, near Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

West Kabul, Afghanistan

India

Los Angeles, United States

The door swings open:
O god of hinges,
god of long voyages,
you have kept faith.
It’s dark in there.
You confine yourself to the darkness
You step in.
The door swings closed.
- Margaret Atwood

Kabul, Afghanistan

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Bombay/Mumbai, India

Kabul, Afghanistan

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Monastery at Rolous, Cambodia

Macedonia

The Door

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden, or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye, or the picture of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if nothing is there,
go and open the door.

At least there’ll be a draught.
- Miroslav Holub
translated from the Czech by Ian Milner

Yemen

Vietnam

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and
comfort – the opening, terror.
Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing -
the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
- Andy Rooney

Everybody Has a Story

Kabul, Afghanistan

Sidon, Lebanon

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds
on the bigger one. 
Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph,
good and evil, despair and hope.
- Dean Koontz

Baalbek, Lebanon

People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being.
Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too.
It goes from one generation to another.
— Studs Terkel

Druze Elders, Lebanon

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by.
-Harvey Cox

Rajasthan, India

 

Scientists who study the brain tell us that we are
hardwired for storytelling and
understanding the world through stories and metaphors.

Père Lachaise Cemetery, France

 

Shalimar Bagh, Kashmir

 

If history were taught in the form of stories,
it would never be forgotten
 - Rudyard Kipling

Maimana, Afghanistan

 …Without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization.
Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own.
—Laurens Van der Post

Poet Khalil Khoury, Iraq

People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs.
— Albert Bates Lord

Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

Near Al Hudaydah, Yemen

 

Texas, USA

Their story, yours and mine — it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and
we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.
— William Carlos Williams

Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, USA

Jimmy Swaggart, Louisiana

 

La Fortuna, Honduras

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
— Muriel Rukeyser

Rajasthan, India

Flechtingen, Germany

Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes Interview, Beverly Hills Hotel, USA

We are lonesome animals.
We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome.
One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel
‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.’
You’re not as alone as you thought.
— John Steinbeck

Brazil

 

I will tell you something about stories, (he said)
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death
- Leslie Marmon Silko

Pristina, Kosovo

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Isak Dinesen

Vrindavan, India

Story behind the picture

The woman in the picture has been a widow for seventy years.
Her husband died when she was 14 years old.
Living in a community of widows since that time, she has made a living as one commissioned to pray for others.
After I made her picture, she invited me to join her for tea.
She spends her days in prayer for people who give her a few rupees.
She lives joyfully, and shows no sign of sorrow, self-pity, or resentment.

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 –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

 

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

Open and Closed

 

 

Vietnam

 

Since the beginning of time, doors have symbolized both great opportunities and thwarted dreams.  The open door is a metaphor for new life, a passage from one stage of life to another, and metamorphosis.  Closed doors represent rejection and exclusion. 

 

 

Kashmir

 

 

The Door
Too little
has been said
Of the door, its one
Face turned to the night’s
Downpour and its other
To the shift and glisten of firelight.

 

 

 Bamiyan, Afghanistan 

 

 

For doors
Are both frame and monument
To our spent time,
And too little
Has been said
Of our coming through and leaving by them.
- Charles Tomlinson

 

 

 India

 

 Cambodia

 

 

Tibet

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Mingun Pagoda, near Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

 

 

Porbandar, India

 

 

 West Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

India

 

 

Los Angeles, United States

 

 

 The door swings open:

O god of hinges,

god of long voyages,

you have kept faith.

It’s dark in there.

You confide yourself to the darkness

You step in.

The door swings closed.
- Margaret Atwood

 

 

 Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

 Bamiyan, Afghanistan

 

A door just opened on a street–
I, lost, was passing by–
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed
And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,–
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
- Emily Dickinson

 

 

Bombay/Mumbai, India

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 Dhaka, Bangladesh

 

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort – the opening terror.

Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing.
 The opening a wonderfully joyous moment.

- A. Rooney

 

 

 

 Monastery at Rolous, Cambodia

 

 

 

 

Macedonia