Cochin Gondola

Cochin, India, is a special place. A former Portuguese colonial town, later a Dutch trading center, the city has a fascinating history. Living on the coast, naturally many people fish for a living. A few still use the old-style, black wooden boats that look like rustic versions of Venetian gondolas. I took this picture into one of them, with the blue filaments of the net and a paddle made of cocoanut wood. Coming into Cochin is always nostalgic for me because there are about 4 photographs taken near there when my grandfather’s WW I British Navy ship came here in 1918. They are the only pictures that exist of that part of his life. It makes me think of how sparsely documented one’s life was just a couple of generations ago. There are few pictures of me as well. Yet today more pictures are taken of a newborn in the first hour of its life than have been taken of me and my grandfather during our whole lives.

Tractor Transport

Ah, found it (see previous post). This was such a wonderful day. The spring of 2006 was one of the best years I had in my life, exploring north Cyprus and making a 15,000 image digital archive of the art and architecture of northern Cyprus. It brought back many fine memories of my youth and my travels 35 years ago. I’m a lucky fellow, I’m still exploring. In the coming months, from January 2 to March 21, I’ll be in Santa Cruz teaching. I’ll be posting images from that wonderful location, but I’ll also start posting some of my favorite images from Cyprus so everyone can get a look at the highlights of that wonderful place.

Old Canadian Machine

India and Turkey are two countries that I’ve travelled in where you can see a lot of tractors made by the Canadian company Massey-Ferguson. At least they used to be Canadian; they might not be today. Anyway, I always look for them. During one visit about two weeks ago, to a place in Moodbidri, India (see post on Jain temple and statue below) called Soans Farm, I saw a very old MF tractor that must have been from the 1950s. It was still going strong. I did a photographic study of its parts and liked this picture. The steel had a kind of rich patina to it and I liked the simplicity of its mechanical parts, its sturdy levers. It seemed so well cared for that you would think it could run forever. One of my favorite memories of living on Cyprus was the day I ventured to find a remote ruin of a Byzantine church that nobody I knew had ever seen. Moreover there were only the sketchiest of indications of its whereabouts. It appeared on no map. I went to a village, hoping for the best. I showed a man a line drawing of the church done a century before. He nodded, and took me to his tractor (a Massey-Ferguson, of course) and drove me for twenty minutes to his fields. There, in the middle of his fields, was the church. Makes me think… I think I took a picture. Stay tuned to this channel.

Shore Crab, Galle

The tidal pools and shorelines near Galle, Sri Lanka, were filled with life. My friend Rich found a small Moray eel in one pool, and everywhere were urchins and very shy crabs, who seemed to know that many people and birds liked to eat them. I took lots of pictures, chasing after them. This was the best portrait I got of my crustacean friends. Later, in the Maldives, there were lots of hermit crabs and another type of crab, light green in colour–Ghost crabs–that ran sideways so fast it was hard to believe.

Another Galle Fisherman

At one beach near Galle, Sri Lanka, rows of men were lined up pulling by hand on a giant seine net that had been set out in the bay. Dozens of them were needed to haul it, and it extended so far out that men had to support the net at its sagging points to keep it from dragging too much in the surf. I took a picture of a man doing just that, pausing in his hard work for a moment to look out at the slowly gathering net, hoping that it held a lot of fish. There wasn’t much colour in the shot to begin with, and I liked mostly the weary man’s pose and the play of the curve of the net and waves, so I went with black and white.

Galle Fishermen

The famous images of fishermen at Galle, in Sri Lanka, are of the fellows that sit up on poles in the surf, but that practice has long ago become something the locals only do for tourists. It was nice instead to see real fishermen working on shores of Galle. There are two images (this one, and above) that I liked. This one shows two fishermen walking along the beach with its warm coloured sand. They clearly were friends and I watched them talk and laugh as they walked away. I liked as well the shanty shacks in a tattered jumble along the beach. Prime real estate in other parts of the world, but here the mere sheds of fishermen and their families.

Nice Smelling Feet

While we’re on the subject of the Jain religion (previous post), here is a picture of some hibiscus flowers that have been left at the feet of a giant statue of a Jain saint, Gomateshwara, at Karkala, India. It dates from the same time as the aforementioned ‘Thousand Pillar Temple’, 1432 CE. The statue itself is 42 feet in height and made of granite. The story goes that Gomateshwara meditated for so long in a standing position that vines began to grow around his body. These are depicted on the statue itself. The drama of the site is also that this statue stands atop a high rock outcrop of a hill. A perfect place for a monumental cult statue. Every 12 years a great scaffolding is built behind the statue so that milk and ghee can be poured over the statue in veneration, along with myriad other votive powders and liquids. There’s an even taller statue of this same saint at a place called Shravanabelagola. At 57 feet it’s the tallest of all Jain saint statues. It too undergoes veneration at the 12 year cycle.

Thousand Pillar Temple

Near Mangalore, India, in the town of Moodabidri, is a Jain temple known as ‘The Temple of a Thousand Pillars’. There aren’t that many pillars, but many little pillars are depicted on the main pillars themselves. I suspect the place has disappointed some visitors with its promising name. But likely they were happy to see it anyway, because it’s a beautiful temple. It was built in the early 15th century and houses a cult statue of the Tirthankara Chandraprabha, a Jain saint. Jainism was an offshoot of Hinduism some time in the 5th or 6th century B.C.E. Here, the cult statue, about 8 feet high, is visible in the temple’s inner sanctum. This lamp and offering bowl marked the outer limit that non-Jains could go, barely half way into the temple structure proper. A surly fellow in his white Jain garb was guarding the door. I liked the warm colours in this picture, the flame and the brass of the lamp. The visage of Mahatma Gandhi stares up from a ten-rupee note in the offering bowl, filled with Sindoor or red Sandalwood powder.

Cashew Kindergarten

A week ago in Mangalore, India, we visited a cashew processing facility. It seemed only women worked there; the hours were long and the work noisy and hard. One thing was sure: after you visited you’d never eat a cashew again without thinking of those women’s labours. The facility had a kindergarten for the workers’ preschool children. A few of them warmed to having visitors and rushed to the gate, but none of them was as precocious as this little girl, who posed beautifully and burst into laughter when anyone showed her the picture on their camera screens. She was moving about all the time, a bundle of energy, so it was hard to get her in focus, but I was happy with this one with her lovely smile and the frames of her hands.

Grades of Rice, Goa

Ten days ago I was exploring the old markets of Goa (Panjim) with its fish and exotic fruits and vegetables. I passed by a little office where a young woman was busy at filling out receipts. In front of her desk was a small table filled with tiny bags of rice, each with a label telling which variety it was. Each grain was a slightly different shape and colour. In Asia people have a fine sense of the varieties of rice and their attributes. This picture made me think of Asia’s ‘rice culture’ compared of our ‘wheat culture’. It’s too bad they didn’t have a tasting station, where a less-than-savvy Westerner could have tested each of them out.