Food for the Soul

Conversation is food for the soul.
- Mexican Proverb

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

 The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much;
always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends;
never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can;
to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

Yemen

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense,
the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
- Sir William Temple, 1628-1699

Tanzania

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another’s observation, not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 – 1873

Morocco

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others.
- Jean de la Bruyere, 1803 – 1873

Italy

 The character of a man is known from his conversations.
- Menander, 342 – 292 BCE

Poet Khalil Khoury, Baghdad, Iraq

 

Japan

 

India

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery!
It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest,
of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
- Guy de Maupassant, 1850 – 1893

Lourdes, France

 

China

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
-  Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, 1533 – 1592

Turkey

 

Russia

 

France

 

Afghanistan

A single conversation with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books.
- Chinese Proverb

Italy

India

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Tanzania

In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation.
I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose,
I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice.
- Michel de Montaigne

Tibet

The very act of preparing and serving tea encourages conversation.
The little spaces in time created by teatime rituals call out to be filled with conversation.
Even the tea itself–warm and comforting-inspires a feeling of relaxation and trust that fosters shared confidences.
Emilie Barnes, If Teacups Could Talk

Italy

The highest good is prayer and conversation with God.
- St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, 347–407

Paraguay

 

Steve McCurry in Omo Valley with men from Surma Tribe

 

PLEASE VISIT
http://www.imagine-asia.org

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

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

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

Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words

Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, Rangoon, Myanmar/Burma

 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.

Myanmar/Burma

Ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press which enabled
everyone access to books, artists have tried to portray the relationship of readers and books.

Myanmar/Burma

Garrett Stewart’s book, The Look of Reading:
Book, Painting, Text, explores the relationship of
reading and art.He points out that a wide array of artists from Rembrandt to  Picasso and Cassatt
and dozens more,over the past 500 years
have painted people reading and the “look of reading” on the subjects’ faces.

Shanghai, China

Rome, Italy

Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy

Chiang Mai, Thailand

  We are familiar with words describing images, but not so
familiar with images describing words and the
impact reading has on our lives.

Istanbul, Turkey

Reading a good book is a universal activity,
and people read while they do just about everything else.

Afghan soldier takes cover from bombardment at Kandahar Airport

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
formerly Victoria Terminus, Mumbai/Bombay, India

Ujjian, India

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

Havana, Cuba

Lourdes, France

Washington Square Park, New York

Venice, Italy

Rome, Italy

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

Istanbul, Turkey

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
- Emily Dickinson

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 –Extended to 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

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

G O A L – Football Fever

Sitwe, Burma, 1996

 

Whether you say futbol, futebol, voetbal, soccer, футбол, or calcio, you already know that football is the most popular sport on the planet.  This World Cup Tournament final match will be the most-watched event in television history.

Burma, 2010

More than simply kicking a ball around, football stirs passions, and crosses every boundary of nationality, race, class, generations, and religion.

Burma, 1984

 

Istanbul, Turkey, 1998

Yemen, 1999

 

Herat, Afghanistan, 2003 

 

Football is played in every corner of the globe by every child who sees a moving ball and kicks it.

The Sahel, Africa, 1986

 

Morocco, 1998

 

“Some people say football is a matter of life and death.  I assure you, it’s much more important than that.” -Bill Shankley

Bangladesh, 1983