Ways of Seeing

 

Windows, Mirrors, and Reflections

 

 

 

Tibet

 

 

I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis.
All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for.
But what there is time for is looking out the window.
- Alice Munro

 

 

Kashmir

 

 

 Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma/Myanmar

 

 

Kashmir

 

 

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”   – John Berger

 

 

Burma/Myanmar

 

 

Hazara Boy, Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Thailand

 

 

India

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

 Mirrors have been the subject of ancient myths, folktales, literature, and superstitions for centuries.
They are often used as a metaphor for insight into one’s self.   

 

 

Kunduz, Afghanistan

 

 

Beirut, Lebanon

 

 

Tibet

 

 

 Yangon, Burma/Myanmar

 

 

Mirror
 
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
- Sylvia Plath

 

 

Jalalabad,  Afghanistan

 

 

 

 Havana, Cuba

 

 

Pakistan

 

 

 Burma/Myanmar

 

 In Greek mythology, Narcissus, looking into a pool of water, did not understand that
he saw his own reflection, and fell in love with himself.

 

 

Agra, India

 

 

“I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn’t make itself apparent at all…” 
-  Jonathan Miller

 

 

 

 

India, Kumbh Mela

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

War’s Children

Young Hazara Soldier, Kabul, Afghanistan

 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies is, in the final sense, a theft from those who
 hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
- Dwight David Eisenhower

 

Unknown Cambodian girl, Holocaust Museum, Phnom Penh

 

 

 

Siem Reap, Cambodia

 

 

 

Kuwait 

 

 

In recent years, an estimated 20 million children have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict and human rights violations and are living as refugees in neighbouring countries or are internally displaced within their own national borders.

  

Afghanistan

 

 

More than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflict over the last decade.
More than three times that number, at least 6 million children, have been permanently disabled or seriously injured. 

 

 

Afghanistan

 

More than 1 million have been orphaned or separated from their families.
Between 8,000 and 10,000 children are killed or maimed by landmines every year.
- Source:  UNICEF 

 

 

Afghanistan

 

 

 

Afghanistan

 

 

 

Afghanistan

 

 

 

Afghanistan 

 

 

 

Kunduz, Afghanistan 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan 

 

 

 

Thailand

 

 

 

Kashmir 

 

In peace, sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature and fathers bury sons.

- Herodotus,  c. 484 – 425 BCE

 

Luzon, Philippines 

 

 

Lebanon