Traveling the World in Photography
June 14, 2008
When the box of books arrived, I opened it with the same excitement and sense of adventure any book-sized package engenders in me. But as I pulled two of the volumes out, I felt my pulse quicken even more. I adore most books, but when books that are exactly in alignment with my personal tastes arrive unexpectedly, well, that is just perfect. Since I indulged myself these last two days in them, I have found them so wonderful I wanted to share them with you too.
Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination is a fine art photography book filled with glorious black-and-white photographs and illustrations of one of earth’s most spectacular areas. This book came out of the Kenneth Hanson’s experiences accompanying his wife on a teaching scholarship to India. A side trip to the Himalayas with his 4x5 view camera yielded, as he put it, a journey of “two imaginative realms: that of the Tibetan Buddhist culture . . . [and] that of the mountaineers and explorers. . . .”
For most of us the Himalayas means Everest, the highest mountain the world, the site of some of the most triumphant and the most tragic of mountaineering adventures. But they are so much more than that. The range, created by the Indian tectonic plate that is moving India away from Africa and Antarctica by pushing the subcontinent against Eurasia, has created three terrains: the High Himalaya, the Kohistan-Ladakh, and the Karakoram. That geologic time is undeterred by human events is noted, Hanson writes, in one of his photographs of the Indus Gorge where “the river has cut through the northern finger of the Himalayan chain near Nanga Parbat. The road belongs to present day political realities, but this is the region where India first collided with Eurasia 50 million years ago. The process continues with no possibility of influence by human action. The photographic record is bonded to the geological drama.”
The photographs are divided into sections called portfolios, five of them: The Mountains of Kashmir, The Hidden Realm, Mountains About the Great Cleft of the Kali Gandaki, The Remoteness of Everest, and Five Treasures of Great Snow. Each portfolio contains a detailed description of the area, and maps that provide both an overview of the region within the whole mountain range and a close-up with routes, villages and peaks indicated, followed by approximately twenty images. Each image is its own page, a stunning reproduction accompanied by a detailed caption. Namche Bazaar’s caption, for example, states that it “is normally reached in two days when approached from Lukla (2,886m/9,468ft). The last part of the ascent is unpleasantly steep for those beginning their acclimatization. The town is set in a bowl above the Bhote Kosi just past the point at which it joins the Dudh Kosi. The tourist trade has transformed the original Sherpa trading center into a collection of tourist lodges and visitors now have a choice of several Internet cafes. (Photograph, Day 20, 1999.)” And of course the mountains themselves are the stars of many of the images.
More than a fine art photography book, Himalayan Portfolios aims to educate the Himalayan admirer about the mountains, the culture and religion, the people, the impact of the world coming to its doors, the importance of photography in discovering the Himalayan story, and much more. This is less a photography book or even a book of the Himalayas than a book that seeks to understand the life story of a mountain range. It’s also a tribute to something ultimately unexplainable, something beyond the ken of human attributes.
Bolivia by Don McLaughlin is the result of his having been sent, as a Standard Oil geologist, to Ecuador via Argentina and then on to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1959. When not searching for oil he explored the region and photographed the people and sights in remote villages and in Cochabamba. “I was sent to Bolivia to help find oil,” he writes. “After two dry holes and some $16 million dollars of expenses, we found none. However, I did find a fascinating country and had a wonderful time probing it with my lens.”
More than 100 glorious black and white photographs are the star of this book. They cover the land as well as the people, and share vast landscapes as well as intimate moments. There is a life to each one that is captured yet in one still moment while allowing us to sense what had come before that moment and what it went on to be. In a dramatic portrait, for example, a man seated at a table, a cup of coffee in front of him, another between him and the camera (the photographer’s?) with its steam rising up to create a cloud of light and dark as the sunlight coming from the left penetrates it and the man’s ears, which stand out from his head. They are bright, almost translucent, proving a startling contrast with the darker portion of his body, his head and face, hidden from the rays of the morning sun. He is identified as Lupo Gioretti, the motorista for their expedition and “also a gifted ventriloquist, a talent he relished in displaying as the trip progressed.”
Two images, one of the magnificent landscape images, this one of a major tin camp at 13,300 feet, and the other of a morning scene spread out below the Hotel Copacabana in La Paz display the range of work McLaughlin shares in Bolivia. Regardless of the subject, McLaughlin infuses each of them with his own sense of appreciation. This is no Anglo dispassionately (or disparagingly) photographing a foreign world around him out of mere curiosity. They are the recordings of a man who was touched by the world into which he had been sent, a world he was invading as a representative of Yankee imperialism (according to local graffiti) but one in which he, the individual, sought to understand and to appreciate.
Like all fine art photography books, these two books offer abbreviated views. No horrors exist in any of these images. Nor do any special celebrations. What we can see in each one is what a friend of mine terms “maintenance,” the ninety percent of life that is living day-to-day, those experiences that are unremembered because they are so common yet which are what we see in the eyes and feel in the bodies of those pictured. It’s an extraordinary thing to capture the mundane in memorable photographs. What makes these images evocative is that the photographers made the invisible detectable and the unremembered remarkable.
Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are none this week.
The Pub House:
Tachyon Publications, the “home of smart science fiction and fantasy,” is a publishing house with a delightful sense of the quirky. The explanation for their name (under the FAQ section) is only the beginning of an amusing trip around their site. But the primary reason for coming here is their books, which, since I am not a fan of SFF, I cannot personally recommend. However, some of their descriptions are delicious. An offbeat novel is The Good Humor Man. Loaded with oddities such as fattening food as contraband, secret liposuction surgery, Elvis Presley, and a homicidal clone, this book seems to have the potential to appeal particularly well to young adults with a taste for the peculiar. The Wall of America is nearly the opposite, a collection of short stories seems to straddle the trembling wall between ordinary life and the shadowy future hovering just out of range. It’s different, and it appears to be worth reading.
Of Interest:
Okay, it’s not related to books or reading but it is something you might want to know about. It’s the Bedfan, an ingenious product that saved my sanity last summer by keeping me cool all night long. The Bedfan is not an air conditioner but a “cooling system” that works by sending waves of air between the sheets. It has internal fans that send the air up from the foot of the bed, around the sides of your body and out past your shoulders. It doesn’t cool the whole bed but merely one person. You set it up on the floor at the bottom of the bed, and tuck the upper sheet around it and the bedspread over it. The air flow is controlled by a remote you control from your hand. If you live in an area with hot nights and don’t want a massive air conditioning bill, I can recommend this.
This Week . . .
congratulations must to go Turkey, which recently opened the library of the International Research Center for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) at its new home in the Yildi Palace Armory. According to this article on Today’s Zaman, their bookshelves stretch for five kilometers (3.1 miles) with desks for reading in between the shelves. The library focuses on Islamic civilization including books on culture, history, literature, and intellectual history. It also houses microfilms and microfiches, atlases, maps and building plans, periodicals, and photographs. Among their treasures are the first Latin translations of the Quran, books printed by the Ottoman Empire’s version of Gutenberg, and rare books in Western languages. The preservation of all kinds of books is always important, and this library’s new location is as lovely as its collections.
Until next week, read well, read often and read on!
Lauren
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