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 Greatest Good

Niger

Music
The greatest good that mortals know
and all of heaven we have below.
- Joseph Addison

Yemen

Rocca Paolina, Perugia, Umbria, Italy 

Chitral, Pakistan

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Street Musician, Dublin, Ireland 

 Honduras

La Habana Vieja, Cuba

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
- Leo Tolstoy

A family plays music on the street hoping for a few rupees, India

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Berthold Auerbach

Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia

Two musicians practice for the Jazz Festival, Perugia, Italy

Music’s the medicine of the mind. 
- John A. Logan

 France

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
- Leonard Bernstein

 Kashmir

Herbie Hancock, Italy
Winner of 14 Grammy Awards, Hancock is a musical icon.

 Kalash Girl, Chitral District of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan

 When words leave off, music begins.
- Heinrich Heine

Khan Murjan restaurant in a 14th century building which
served as an inn for travellers and traders.  Baghdad, Iraq

Whiskey a Go Go, a fixture on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, California, United States

Pianist waits to perform in a supper club, Shanghai, China

Alto Churumazu, Peru

 Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
- Alphonse de Lamartine

Marrakesh, Morocco

Traditional performers,  Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California

Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you,
music itself is not going to let you down.
- Virgil Thomson, Composer, Winner of the Pulitzer Price, 1949

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Seal  greets Steve McCurry at concert, PhotoKina,Cologne, Germany
Courtesy of Matthias Krug,  September 17, 2012

CURRENT AND FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

Oeksnehallen, Copenhagen, Denmark – Ongoing
Gallery N, Seoul Arts Centre, Seoul, South Korea – Opening on September 12th, 2012
Leica Photokina, Hall 1, Cologne, Germany – September 18, 2012
Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – October 6th, 2012
Plazzo Ducale, Genova, Italy – October 17, 2012
Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles – November 15, 2012
Chris Beetles Gallery, London, U.K. – January 15, 2013
Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg, Germany – January 19, 2013
Cavalier Gallery, Greenwich, CT – April 12 – May 6, 2013
Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland – June 1, 2013

River of Life

KOLKATA TO KABUL

Kolkata/Calcutta

“Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers,
barbers and bunnias,pilgrims -and potters -all the world going and coming.
It is to me as a river from which I am
withdrawn like a log after a flood.
And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle.
Such a river of life as no where else exists in the world.”
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Kolkata

Howrah Bridge

For more than 20 centuries, travelers have walked, ridden, prayed, traded, invaded, escaped,
fought, and died along the 1,500 miles of the Grand Trunk Road which stretches from Kolkata to Kabul.

On the GTR in Bihar State, India

Here are some pictures of people and places I have taken along the route of the Grand Trunk Road during the past thirty years.

Varanasi, India

Varanasi, India

Varanasi, India

Agra, India

Near Agra, India

 Red Fort, Delhi

Allahabad, India

Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India

 Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism all developed along the route,
and Muslims proclaimed their beliefs on their journeys along the road.

Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India

Amritsar, India

Amritsar, India

Sikh Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

 The Grand Trunk Road served as the two way escape route for
75 million refugees caught between Indian and Pakistan during Partition.

Lahore, Pakistan

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar, Pakistan
Peshawar has been a haven for Afghan refugees during decades of war.

Outside of Peshawar, Pakistan

Peshawar is strategically located at the crossroads of Central and South Asia.

Landi-Kotal, Pakistan
Near the border with Afghanistan

 Khyber Pass connects Pakistan and Afghanistan

Jalalabad, Afghanistan

Jalalabad, Afghanistan

This ribbon of humanity stretching Northwest from Kolkata, the city of culture and joy, to Kabul, the city of conflict,
has been moving merchants, buyers, conquerors, refugees, prophets, nomads and pilgrims through what is today
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Jalalabad, Afghanistan

Jalalabad, Afghanistan

On the road to Sarobi

Along this road, forged by conquerors and invaders,
the GT facilitated some of the most significant historical developments which affect us today.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Kabul is over 3,500 years old; many empires have  invaded the valley for its
strategic location along the trade routes of Central and South Asia.

 Kabul, Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Along the route of the GT there is a  struggle between secular modernity and the conservatism of ancient religions.

Importance of Elsewhere

Calcutta, India

In Paul Theroux’s new book, The Tao of Travel, he writes,
“As a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight — my little self hurrying off alone.
I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.  The importance of elsewhere was something
I took on faith.  Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be.”

Afghanistan

 ”The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human; the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to
change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger,
to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown …”   – Theroux

Brazil

Niger

Mali

Mizoram, India

Shanghai, China

Havana, Cuba

“…The tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a
few weeks or months,the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly,
over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.”
- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky 

Tibet

Tibet

Thailand

India

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust

India

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

“All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the
midst of terror and wonder. ”
- Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

Varanasi, India

Bangladesh

Bangladesh

 

Sulu Sea, Philippines

“There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit.
You can see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.”
- John Steinbeck

Burma/Myanmar

 ”Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain

Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet

Paul Theroux, Papagayo, Costa Rica

 

“Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux

Agra, India

 

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

Language of Looking

Please scroll to the bottom for the unseen portrait of the week. 

 There are many ways to describe the ways that people look at each other and the world.  We peek, stare, glance, gaze, gape, glare, and peer.  We also examine, contemplate, squint, and observe.

 

 Jodhpur, India

Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

 Berlin, Germany

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. 
 - Henry David Thoreau 

Croatia

Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghanistan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Thirumullaivayil, India

One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily
symbol of identity. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Train to Peshawar, Pakistan

Myanmar/Burma

Paraguay

Barkhor Quarter, Lhasa, Tibet

It’s the way to educate your eyes.  Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.  Die knowing something.  You are not here long.
- Walker Evans  

Reina Sofia, National Museum of Art, Madrid, Spain

If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time,
you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.
-  G. K. Chesterton 

Jaipur, India

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to.
If the thing is there, why, there it is.
- Walker Evans

A man examines photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 prison camp, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

 Unseen Portrait of the WeekBaluchistan, Pakistan

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

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.

Afghanistan’s Ancient Absolutes

    I traveled with  the Afghan Mujahadeen in 1979, who were determined to resist,  undermine, and overthrow the Marxist puppet central government.  This was before the Soviets invaded.  I photographed men girding for war and women selling jewelry to buy ammunition.

We  traveled as much as thirty miles a day subsisting on tea and bread with an occasional bonus of goat cheese or yogurt.  The only drinking water was what we scooped out of an irrigation ditch.

I traveled with many different mujahadeen and militia groups. We mainly traveled at night to avoid being spotted by the Soviet helicopters. Most of the time we walked, but a few times we were able to borrow horses. I was always astonished at the continual pipeline of weapons and supplies going into Afghanistan from Pakistan around the clock. Rockets, mortar rounds, ammunition, were carried in by camels, donkeys, and fighters.

I witnessed strafing by Soviet helicopter gunships, ambushes of Russian convoys, forced marches of captured soldiers, and the mujahadeen jumping on top of helicopters they brought down with Stinger missles.

During the ten years the Russians were in Afghanistan, they killed one million Afghans; five million became refugees.

These are the proud men who were girding for war in a place where ancient absolutes still prevail.
- Adapted from Owen Edwards in American Photographer magazine, 1980.

 

 

 

There was a deep camaraderie amongst the fighters who were on the greatest mission of their lives.   They didn’t worry much about casualty numbers. The harder the fight was, the stronger they became. Walking in the snow without boots high up in the Hindu Kush was commonplace.  Those men were as tough as it gets, yet they could be gentle and tender with children.

As much as outsiders have tried to “re-form” the country in their own image, Afghanistan  has been able to absorb the blows of superpowers, and remain essentially the same. The interesting thing to me is that those trying to change it,  change more than the country does even after Herculean efforts of  governments, NGO’s, and coalitions.