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

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

Everybody Has a Story

Kabul, Afghanistan

Sidon, Lebanon

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds
on the bigger one. 
Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph,
good and evil, despair and hope.
- Dean Koontz

Baalbek, Lebanon

People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being.
Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too.
It goes from one generation to another.
— Studs Terkel

Druze Elders, Lebanon

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by.
-Harvey Cox

Rajasthan, India

 

Scientists who study the brain tell us that we are
hardwired for storytelling and
understanding the world through stories and metaphors.

Père Lachaise Cemetery, France

 

Shalimar Bagh, Kashmir

 

If history were taught in the form of stories,
it would never be forgotten
 - Rudyard Kipling

Maimana, Afghanistan

 …Without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization.
Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own.
—Laurens Van der Post

Poet Khalil Khoury, Iraq

People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs.
— Albert Bates Lord

Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

Near Al Hudaydah, Yemen

 

Texas, USA

Their story, yours and mine — it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and
we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.
— William Carlos Williams

Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, USA

Jimmy Swaggart, Louisiana

 

La Fortuna, Honduras

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
— Muriel Rukeyser

Rajasthan, India

Flechtingen, Germany

Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes Interview, Beverly Hills Hotel, USA

We are lonesome animals.
We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome.
One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel
‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.’
You’re not as alone as you thought.
— John Steinbeck

Brazil

 

I will tell you something about stories, (he said)
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off
illness and death
- Leslie Marmon Silko

Pristina, Kosovo

Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan

To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Isak Dinesen

Vrindavan, India

Story behind the picture

The woman in the picture has been a widow for seventy years.
Her husband died when she was 14 years old.
Living in a community of widows since that time, she has made a living as one commissioned to pray for others.
After I made her picture, she invited me to join her for tea.
She spends her days in prayer for people who give her a few rupees.
She lives joyfully, and shows no sign of sorrow, self-pity, or resentment.

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 –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

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

A Matter of Faith

 Girl praying at a mosque, Kabul,  Afghanistan

 

 I have seen many manifestations of  faith during my travels over the past three decades.  Some have been spontaneous, some have been part of a liturgy, some have been prescribed rituals, some have been in magnificent buildings, others have been outside under a tree.   Some people’s faith is embedded in the way they live their lives.

 

 

 

Shaolin monks training, Zhengzhou, China

 

“Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith.”   Mohandas Gandhi

 

 

Prayers and teaching, Peshawar, Pakistan

 

 

 

 Sikh holiest site, Golden Temple,  Amritsar, India

 

 

 

 

Sri Lanka

 

 

 

Prayer Flags, Lhasa, Tibet

 

 

 

Charlotte, North Carolina

 

 

 Religious Instruction – Jewish child  in Yemen

 

 

 

Srinagar, Kashmir

 

 

 

Brazil

 

 

Camino, Italy

 

 

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.  To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”   

- St. Thomas Aquinas

 

 

India

 

 

Thrissur Pooram, Kerala, India

 

  “Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.”

    - Rabindranath Tagore

 

                                                                       

Tibetan Prayer Festival in Bodh Gaya, India

 

 

Pilgrim praying with monks at the Buddhist Academy of Larung Gar, Kham Province, Tibet

 

“What is Faith?  When your good deed pleases you and your evil deed grieves you, you are a believer.”

- Prophet Muhammad

 

Monk at Jokhang temple, Lhasa, Tibet

 

Yemen at the Crossroads

Women Gathering Clover, Shibam, Wadi Hadhramaut, Yemen 

 

Strategically located at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia,  ancient Yemen became wealthy from the spice trade.  It was so rich the Romans called the land Arabia Felix, Happy Arabia.  Augustus Ceasar tried, but failed, to annex it.  Today it is the poorest country in the Arab world. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chronic unemployment, dwindling oil and water supplies, high illiteracy rates, government corruption, and a feuding tribal culture, have created fertile ground for a growing Al-Qaeda presence.

 

 

 

 

 Sana’a, a living museum,  was declared a World Heritage City by the United Nations in 1986.  There are efforts  to preserve some of the oldest buildings, which are over 1000 years old, but many think that it is too little too late.

 

 

Sana’a is a must, however long it takes to get there – Yemeni Proverb

 

 

 

  

 

 

In January and February, 2011, thousands of Yemenis marched to demand a change in government.  The president who has been in power for decades pledged not to run again when his term runs out in 2013.   With 40% unemployment, malnutrition, and rising food prices, it is difficult to see how he can keep the reins of power without major concessions. 

 

 Women queue up to vote in parliamentary elections

 

 

 

In Yemen’s weapon’s culture, it is estimated that there are at least three firearms for each person. 

 

 

 Known as “jambiya”,  ornamental knives are an important fashion accessory for Yemeni men.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tradition of reciting poetry represents a rich cultural heritage in Yemen.  Oral poetry has offers a socially acceptable way for men and women to solve problems, manage conflicts, and communicate feelings of sorrow, happiness, and worry, according to Najwa Adra, a New York-based anthropologist.

 

 

 

Some poets in Yemen are using poetry to battle extremism.

 

O men of arms, why do you love injustice?
You must live in law and order
Get up, wake up, or be forever regretful,
Don’t be infamous among the nations

-Amin al-Mashreqi

 

The Art of Timing

“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing.  There is a time for silence.  A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny, and a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.” – Gloria Naylor

Cape Town,  South Africa

“ We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
- Samuel Johnson

Darjeeling, India

Morocco

“True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation.”
- George Washington

Pagan, Burma

Croatia

Germany

Kashmir

“What is a friend?  A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”  - Aristotle

Yemen

Cape Town, South Africa

Kabul, Afghanistan

Yemen

Indonesia

Mumbai, India

“Friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.”  - Aristotle

India

Tibet

“Hold a true friend with both your hands.”  -  Nigerian Proverb

India

India

Family, Nature’s Masterpiece

Tagong, Tibet

Families return to Herat, Afghanistan

Burma/Myanmar

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
-Jane Howard

Viet Tri City, Vietnam

Tihamah Plain, Yemen

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” - George Santayana

Honduras

Jodhpur, India

Shanghai, China

Maimana, Afghanistan

Tiguent, Mauritania

Macedonia

Cambodian refugees in Thailand

Porbandar, Gujarat

“The family is the nucleus of civilization.” -  William Durant

Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words Part III

Herat, Afghanistan

For hundreds of years artists have tried to portray the relationship of a reader and his/her book.  We are familiar with words describing images, but not so familiar with images describing words and the impact that reading has on our lives.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Kham, Tibet

Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma

“Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.”  – Charles Scribner

Old Delhi, 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.

Varanasi, India

Kham, Tibet

The world’s largest book fair will be held in Frankfurt starting on October 6. Publishers, booksellers, agents, film producers,  authors, and journalists from all over the world will attend.  It is a privilege that my series of reading pictures will be projected during the opening press conference and featured in the daily publication, Publishing Perspectives.

Saõ Paolo, Brazil

Angkor Thom,  Angkor, Cambodia

Susan Sontag said, ”The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality…” The same can be said for reading books.

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Yangon, Burma

Tokyo, Japan

Shanghai, China

“We read to know we’re not alone.”   – C.S. Lewis

Yemen