In last week’s post, I talked about the extravagant, expressive use of color halfway around the world from home. Today’s photo is similar energy, but just a few blocks from my front door. Last Friday was the annual Savannah bacchanal, officially known as Saint Patrick’s Day, the premier public party event in Savannah. There have been years in the past when I started early and went late, but that was then and this is now. Barbara and I can stop by several friends’ parties for Bloody Marys or Irish coffee, plus breakfast buffets in the morning, wander the streets randomly sampling the never-ending parade, and be back home for a nap by mid-afternoon.
Because the March 17th Friday date made it a long weekend this year, and with beautiful, cool, sunny weather, I think most expectations were for a very large number of visitors and a rowdy crowd in the evenings. It seemed to be pretty quiet to us though, judging by the few numbers of drunks yelling at each other at 3 AM about who was supposed to remember where the car was parked, although there was one in particular I remember, hearing the near weeping relief when he yelled out, “I found it! I found it!”
Not comprehensive by any stretch, I did shoot some random scenes (somehow missing all the military and ROTC units) that I’ve posted as a new gallery, St. Patrick’s Day, Savannah, 2023. To see that, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G00006PGSXuRa_cw
The streets of Dhaka are an open-air gallery teeming with rickshaw art. Subject matter may vary wildly, but one emphatic consistency is color. Rich, saturated color. In your face color. Color combinations that stretch one’s imagination about ways colors can be synchronized.
While I don’t think I’m dogmatic about general, foundational elements of art-making (but then,who ever thinks they are dogmatic about anything?), I do have some training and experience with the codification of things like design and color theory, and that inevitably influences choices I make. On color, I learned about the color wheel and how every potential/theoretical color (hue, brightness, and saturation) can be placed in a specific definable position. I used the Munsell Color System to create a three color mix to decorate a box choosing a primary, contrasting, and complimentary color selection, in diminishing proportions, based on their relative positions on the wheel. In hindsight, that all sounds more like an intellectual exercise than art, but it’s the sort of education that is useful if you can avoid getting caught inside the lines.
So, I have been inclined to work with color over the years in terms of contrasting and/or complimentary, with a kind of visual “weight” deciding the balance of volume for each. Several years ago I was planning some spring planting for my deck’s clay pot garden, fussing a bit over color combinations, when a friend said, “For gardens and flowers you can mix anything and it will work OK.” I relaxed, tried it; she was right.
Bangladeshis apparently apply that color philosophy to all of life, illustrated here by the young woman’s outfit consisting of at least four very different fabrics/prints. Coming from a part of the world where the standard pant is khaki, walking around Dhaka is like stepping inside a kaleidoscope. It’s a rich, vibrant, chaotic, fascinating, hypnotic visual explosion.
I have mentioned previously, I’m sometimes surprised to find how many people pictures I make without realizing it at the time. True, once again, in Bangladesh and here is a new gallery “Faces, Bangladesh, 2012.” Go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000mEaxYnNexwQ
It’s funny how a simple comment can alter the way you perceive something. In any consideration/comparison of still and video photography, I usually think about how a moving image (video) is actually a series of still images, shot and projected in quick enough sequence that the eye/brain “sees” a moving picture. This opening quote suggests starting with the perception of motion that is then frozen, rather than going from still images that then create the illusion of movement.
The quote is from “Words and Pictures,” (published 1952) by Wilson Hicks, an Executive Editor for Life Magazine, and the book is Hicks’ look at how photography, photographers, writers, and editors work together to cover a story, some of it modeled on the way Life worked their teams, some of it a hope for photographers to become a more integrated part of the coverage team. It’s the sort of book at first I think I should have read many years ago, at the beginning of my career, because it talks about a lot of the things I learned through experience. Probably would not have mattered much in my learning curve, though. You can only absorb and understand what you are ready for, and knowledge is built in layers, over time.
I like the way the “stopped movie” idea mimics the effort to trigger an exposure at a peak moment, where the image is taut with the tension of what will happen in the next moment.
The Buriganga River cuts through Dhaka like an interstate. Commercial and public transportation create constant activity back and forth between the banks, and large ferries connect Dhaka (metro area population-over 22 million) with the other communities around the riverine delta at the apex of Bengal Bay.
East, west, and south of the city the Brahmaputra, the Ganges/Padma, the Mehna, and numerous smaller rivers like the Buriganga gradually merge as they drain the majority of the Himalayas into the bay.
I was sitting at my desk thinking about what to write about this, but realized, there is nothing I can say about a pink burka that the pink burka does not already say, and better than me. I will say that it was about 110 degrees F. that day, and I felt like I was dressed too warmly with just a t-shirt and shorts.
Panam Nagar is a short drive from Dhaka, the current capital of Bangladesh. It was established in the late 13th century and was a trading and political hub as the capital of Bengal in the 15th century. Today the elaborate buildings sit, mostly abandoned, slowly deteriorating. I suppose location really is everything when it comes to real estate. These places would command a very large purchase price, and substantial financial commitment to renovation if they were sitting in Savannah.
We had hired a rickshaw driver outside our hotel entrance to tour us around in the city of Dhaka for the day, and he turned out to be a great guide, so we arranged with him to get a car and driver and take us into the surrounding countryside the next day.
One of our first stops was the Goaldi Mosque, built in the 1500s and very nicely restored. While we were checking it out, and making a few photos, we heard/saw this commotion at the madrassa next door. You don’t get much variety day-to-day in the countryside, so a couple of large Americans layered with cameras are downright exotic. The boys’ instructors decided they would probably get everyone back to their studies quicker if they just let them say hello to us, and pose for a photograph. You can see in the formal group shot in the web-gallery (link below), the instructors were less enthusiastic than the boys.
It was inevitable that Randy and I would stand out in a place like Bangladesh. You just roll with it, smile, be friendly, respect local customs. The reception was much warmer than I expected, for a couple of infidels in a Muslim country. We were regularly asked to be in people’s photos, including several men who paired us with their wives, who were often dressed in hijabs, or even burkas. Whatever conservative posture the form of the clothing carried, many of the women showed a real flare in the colors, patterns, and fabrics they would combine in what at first looks like simple, modest apparel.
Hindu Street is a commercial Hindu enclave in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, primarily and officially Muslim, and exploring this area was the first thing my traveling partner, Randy, and I did on what would be a three week trip through Bangladesh and India.
I was a day late getting to Dhaka; maybe it was kismet. My reason for making this journey was Dad. My flight from Beijing to Dhaka took off so late, when we reached the one stop on the flight, Kunming, that airport was shut down and we could not continue, so several of us were taken to a local -1 star hotel to wait for the next day’s once-a-day only flight to Dhaka.
Dad was a supply sergeant in the US Army Air Corps, stationed at one of the approximately 25 airbases the Allies had setup in Bengal (Bangladesh and Pakistan were both still part of India then) to fly supplies over the Himalayas (“The Hump”) to General Chiang Kai Shek in Kunming, during World War II. My flight out of China was the same route as the return flight of all those crews who flew in the most dangerous flying conditions. The combination of altitude, constant bad weather, and Japanese fighter pilots led to more downed planes here than in Europe.
I’ve wondered what a country boy from south Georgia who did not finish the seventh grade must have thought of a place so alien to everything he knew. He never said much about his service, or anything else for that matter; Dad was a man of few words, but I remember once he said he did not understand how there could be so much hunger when there were cows freely walking the streets. Dad’s been gone almost 50 years now, but a few years ago I was looking in a pocket notepad he had and discovered he had written down the arrival and departure date and time for every post he was sent to, including all the connections for the flights to get from Miami to Dhaka, a convoluted trip that went down the east coast of South America, across the southern Atlantic via Ascension Island, and then through central Africa, Yemen, Oman, and across India. No exposition, few words like I said, just names, dates, and times. Hoping to follow his journey became a major item on my bucket list.
My trip was 67 years after Dad was there, so there are certainly differences, but my hunch is what he found there was much the same as what I found–poverty, poor infrastructure, noise and chaos in the streets, but also an easy acceptance, courtesy, curiosity about who we were, and a willingness to share their world. For the next few weeks I’ll be reliving that journey with the first step being a new gallery on my website, “City, Region, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2012.” These photos are a selection from wandering the streets and driving out in the countryside to see Panam Nagar, the capital of the fifteenth-century Bengal ruler Isa Khan, an elaborate place mostly abandoned now.
Barbara has a thing for animals. She will be skeptical about the acceptability of a two star hotel, but spend 10 days sleeping on a cot, in a tent, with a slit trench for a toilet, in the Serengeti, without complaint, just to watch them in the wild.
One of the fund-raising tactics of the Bifengxia Giant Panda facility is to offer a few minutes holding and feeding a baby panda…for a hefty contribution. Done. I owed Barbara this one. She had joined me for a workshop in China and as we were settling into our coach seats for our 15 hour non-stop trans-Pacific flight, a flight attendant told me my frequent flyer status made a vacant first class seat available for me. You know–the seats that do a 100% flat recline into a bed, partitioned into privacy, with attentive staff at a much lower staff-to-passenger ration than in steerage?
I immediately said how much I appreciated the offer, but that I was traveling with my wife and I would just stay there with her. Barbara immediately said, “No. Go. You have to work as soon as you get there. You will be rested when we get in,” or something to that effect. I owed her.
We were in Aswan, at the Temple of Philae, when I turned and he was standing there in that light. Some photographs are just gifts from the Universe.
I’m often asked, “What is your favorite thing to photograph?” “Naked women,” is sometimes my reply, because I’m a smart-ass and just can’t help myself. (Barbara keeps telling me a lot of people don’t get my sense of humor.) I usually follow up with a “real” answer, that I like travel oriented photography, but that’s really a non-answer, too, because travel photography is everything–landscapes, cityscapes, people, flowers, architecture, monuments, events, and on and on.
For me, making a photograph is less about the nominal subject, and more about how I can work with all the visual elements in the scene to get the strongest, cleanest design, to support whatever the story is. I started my career on a daily newspaper, where a staffer had to shoot everything–from breaking news to check presentations for the Newsroom, athletic meets/games and players for the Sports Department, and more lifestyle type assignments for the Women’s Section (and if that gender label bothers you, at least it was an improvement over the previous name, the Society pages). Editors were on deadlines, expecting photos they already had planned in their layouts, so one fundamental of the job was, you had to come back with a usable picture. Oh, also, it was going to be printed with an 80 line screen on paper not much better than toilet paper so don’t be clever; fine details don’t reproduce. Fifty-five years later I’m still discovering how much that first job influenced everything I’ve done since then.
Oddly, even though I started in journalism where almost every picture is about people in some way, I never think of myself as a “people” photographer, maybe because I see of them as simply another element in the scene, but when I go through the take from a trip I find lots of people, and striking faces.
Hot air balloon ride overlooking Valley of the Kings
We started in the dark, with a boat and bus ride, to catch a sunrise launch for a hot air balloon float overlooking the Valley of the Kings. This view is looking northwest toward the Pharaohs’ necropolis. About a mile to the east from here is the southern Nile. Across the river is Luxor, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, population just under a half million, encompassing the ancient city of Thebes, and the ruins of the temples Karnack and Luxor. The agricultural ribbon along the banks of the Nile expands and contracts, and here, in one of the broader sections, is a little over two miles wide, then quickly transitions from fertile to arid. Tut’s tomb (and body, but not burial artifacts) is located just the other side of the ridge line on the left, along with several Ramses nearby. Beyond that, continuing west, are 3000 miles of desert sand and rock, all the way to the lapping waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
Superficially, there’s great contrast as sand meets salty water, but a lyric from America’s “A Horse With No Name,” comes to mind suggesting a commonality between the grand landscapes of desert and ocean:
“The ocean is a desert with its life underground And a perfect disguise above”
