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

The Power of Nature

 Please scroll to the bottom for the UnpublishedPortrait 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

 

Chasing the Monsoon: A Year in the Rain

 I was eleven years old when I saw a photo essay on the monsoon in India in Life Magazine by Brian Brake, the New Zealand-born Magnum photographer.
His work established his reputation as a master color photoessayist. Twenty years later, I proposed a story to National Geographic to photograph the monsoon. The next year I joined Magnum Photos.

People have often asked me what it was like spending almost a year photographing the monsoon. I spent several months following the monsoon which affects half the people on the planet.

Weather is often my best ally as I try to capture the perfect mood for my pictures, but photographing the monsoon was an experience that taught me a lot about patience and humility.

Photographing in heavy rain is difficult because you have to constantly wipe the rain drops from the camera lens. That takes about a third of the time. Monsoon rain is accompanied by winds that try to wrestle away the umbrella that is wedged between my head and shoulders.

I spent four days, in a flooded city in Gujarat, India, wading around the streets in waist-deep water that was filled with bloated animal carcasses and other waste material. The fetid water enveloped me leaving a greasy film over my clothes and body. Every night when I returned to my flooded hotel, empty except for a nightwatchman, I bathed my shriveled feet in disinfectant.

Once I was almost sucked down into one of the holes in the street in Bombay into which water was rushing. It took every bit of my strength to keep from losing my balance. After that close call, I shuffled along, inch by inch, yard by yard, until I had to abandon my cautious instincts.

I had to see the monsoon as a predictable yearly event, and not the disaster it seemed to my western eyes. The 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.

When I was in Porbundar, the historic birthplace of Gandhi, I came upon a dog. There he was, locked out of the house, standing on a tiny piece of concrete as the flood waters rose. His expression betrayed his emotions. You can tell by the picture that he realizes his predicament and hope his owner opens the door soon.

Actually, a moment after I took the picture, the door opened and he ran inside.