All Creatures Great and Small

Thailand

Burma/Myanmar

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all
-Cecil Frances, 1848

Thailand

Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant;
the only harmless great thing.
- John Donne

Tibet

 

India

India

 

Bangladesh

Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures;
none show more passionate tenderness to their
young when deprived of them; and, in short,
I am not ashamed to profess a deep
love for these quiet creatures.
-Thomas de Quincey

India

Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump;
you may be freeing him from being a camel.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton

Rajasthan, India

Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride,
Friendship without envy,
Or beauty without vanity?
Here, where grace is served with muscle
And strength by gentleness confined
He serves without servility; he has fought without enmity.
There is nothing so powerful, nothing less violent.
There is nothing so quick, nothing more patient.
~Ronald Duncan, The Horse

Paraguay

 

Konigslutter, Germany

Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
- Anatole France

Tibet

 

Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan

 A horse is worth more than riches.
- Spanish Proverb

Yemen

Without a shepherd, sheep are not a flock.
-Russian Proverb

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

All goats are mischievous thieves, gate-crashers,
and trespassers. Also they possess individual
character, intelligence, and capacity for affection
which can only be matched by the dog.
–David Mackenzie, Farmer in the Western Isles

Tibet

 

West Bengal, India

 

Bosnia

 

India

Thailand

 

Burma/Myanmar

As an inspiration to the author,
I do not think the cat can be over-estimated.
He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism.
I do not wonder that many writers love cats;
I am only surprised that all do not.
- Carl Van Vechten

Honduras

Peru

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.
- James Herriot

Italy

A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes.
- Indian Proverb

Yangon, Burma/Myanmar

 

Cambodia

 

India

 

India

 

Moscow, Russia

 

Colombia

 

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

 

Russia

 

Burma/Myanmar

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be
judged by the way its animals are treated.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Please see the Behind the Scenes video about the Rome Exhibition:

http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/video/2012/february/07/behind-the-scenes-with-steve-mccurry/

The Firmest Friend

 The poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend.
- Lord Byron

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

Dogs are our link to paradise.
They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be
back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring.
It was peace.
- Milan Kundera

 

Ireland

 

Kham, Eastern Tibet

 

Varanasi, India

The dog … is the god of frolic.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Angkor, Cambodia

New Delhi, India

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

With eye upraised his master’s look to scan,
The joy, the solace, and the aid of man:
The rich man’s guardian and the poor man’s friend,
The only creature faithful to the end.
- George Crabbe

Porbandar, India

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
- Konrad Lorenz

Bagan, Burma

 

Rome, Italy

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who
returned home after being absent for more than twenty years
and was recognized only by his dog.
- Guillermo C. Infante

Marseille, France

Vietnam

India

 

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have
known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
- James Thurber

Texas, USA

Histories are more full of the examples
of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
- Alexander Pope

India

Bhutan

Jaipur, India

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers,
is contained in the dog.
Franz Kafka, Investigations of the Dog

Near Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

 

Rome, Italy

California, USA

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in
this selfish world, the one that never deserts him,
the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.
- George Graham

Paraguay

If you think you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
-  Cowboy Wisdom

 

Gruffy, our family dog, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania

We invite you to visit our new website:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

More Fun and Games

Wodaabe Tribe, Niger

Laughter is by definition healthy.
- Doris Lessing,  Nobel Laureate in Literature

La Fortuna, Honduras

Shanghai Circus, Shanghai, China 

Moscow, Russia 

Perugia, Italy

If music be the food of love, play on.
- William Shakespeare

Havana, Cuba

India

Rajasthan, India

Lucknow, India

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
- W. H. Auden

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon

Mersin, Turkey 

Could we look into the head of a Chess player,
we should see there a whole world of feelings,
images, ideas, emotion and passion.
- Alfred Binet

Jodhpur, India

Peru

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Some people believe football is a matter of
life and death.
I’m very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
- Bill Shankly, English soccer manager.

Maningrida, Australia

Tibet

Young Shepherd during Holi, Rajasthan, India

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
- Immanual Kant

Istanbul, Turkey

Until one has loved an animal,
a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
- Anatole France

Mumbai/Bombay, India

 

Buzkashi, Kabul, Afghanistan

Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

They say golf is like life, but don’t believe them.
Golf is more complicated than that.
- Gardner Dickinson

Bangladesh

 

Yemen

 

You must invent your own games and
teach us old ones how to play.
- Nikki Giovanni

Burma/Myanmar

Varanasi, 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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Coming of Age

 All of living is a process of coming of age, of reconciling
the essence of the inner self with one’s outer being,with the world, and with
changing expectations for that self in the world.
- Kay E. Vandergrift

Rome, Italy

The teen and young adult years, when young people are perched precariously on the brink between childhood and
adult responsibilities, are, of course, when the coming of age process is most obvious.
- K.E.V.

Kabul, Afghanistan

Tanzania

Los Angeles, USA

The imagination of a boy is healthy,
and the mature imagination of a man is healthy;
but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment,
the character undecided, the way of life uncertain,
the ambition thick-sighted.
 -  John Keats

Havana, Cuba

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition

- Theodore Roethke

Gubbio, Italy

Germany

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
- Abraham Lincoln

Kabul, Afghanistan

Budapest, Hungary

 

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect,
he becomes an adolescent;
the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult;
the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
- Alden Nolan

Kabul, Afghanistan

Dublin, Ireland

We don’t stop playing because we grow old.
We grow old because we stop playing.
- George Bernard Shaw

Italy

Flechtingen, Germany

Zabid, Yemen

Germany

 

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh — at yourself.
- Ethel Barrymore

La Fortuna, Honduras

Honduras

 

Zagreb, Croatia

Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and
while they are trying to work out who they are as people,  never mind as a dancer.
So train the whole person, not just the dancer.
- Deborah Bull

Tibet

Passage

Young man,
Young woman,
Life turns for you.
This is a magic time,
a mythic passage,
In your becoming
We who welcome you,
None of us is too old
So as to have forgotten
–the mystery of not
knowing,
–the delight of first
discovery,
–the impatience to hurry
what will come next
–the terrible wonderfulness
of the changes…
-Edward Searl

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

Children at Work

The Sahel, Africa

 

In developing countries one in six children from 5 to 14 years old is involved in child labor.

 

 

 

Ship-breaking yard, Mumbai, India

 

 

Lhasa, Tibet

 

 

In the least developed countries, 30 percent of all children are engaged in child labor.

 

 

Marpha, Nepal

 

 

Worldwide, 126 million children work in hazardous conditions, often enduring beatings, humiliation and sexual violence by their employers.

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

The highest proportion of child laborers is in sub-Saharan Africa, where 26 percent of children (49 million) are involved in work.

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Kandahar, Afghanistan

 

 

An estimated 1.2 million children — both boys and girls — are trafficked each year into exploitative work in agriculture, mining, factories, armed conflict or commercial sex work.

 

 

Mandalay, Myanmar/ Burma

 

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Bamiyan, Afghanistan 

 

 

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together,  and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” -  Grace Abbott

 

 

 

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 

 

 Kabul, Afghanistan

 

 

Pul i Khumri, Afghanistan

 

 ImagineAsia’s Storybook Project for Afghan Children

The mission of ImagineAsia, a 501c3 non-profit organization, is to work in partnership with local community leaders and regional NGO’s to help students in Afghan communities receive fundamental educational materials and resources. 

IA  has started to translate Aesop’s fables into Dari for the children of Afghanistan who have never had a book of their own.  Translated and illustrated by volunteers, these stories will reach families in remote areas of the country.

For thousands of years the fables have revealed universal truths through simple allegories.  The stories often use animals to  teach lessons that are easily understood by people of all ages.

Here are some sample pages:

The Lion and the Mouse –  illustrated by Jason Melcher

 

 The Boy Who Cried Wolf - illustrated by Kate Raines

 

Pitcher and the Crow -  illustrated by Lois Andersen

 

 

An Afghan Folktale – The Silver on the Hearth – illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

Tortoise and Hare –  illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

The Donkey and its Purchaser – illustrated by Kate Harrold

 

 

The Sun and the Wind – illustrated by Annie Zimmerman

 

 

 The Fox and the Goat – illustrated by Jason Melcher

 

 http://www.imagine-asia.org/

 

Sources: http://www.unicef.org, http://www.ilo.org, www.crin.org