Posts Tagged ‘Wheel of Life’

Typhoon Haiyan, Philippines

In early November, Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines causing major loss of life and damage to property. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without adequate food, shelter, sanitation and medical assistance.

I was in the Philippines in June, as anyone who has been following the blog will know and anyone who saw my recent exhibition will have seen images from that country such as the one below. To think that the people I met who already had so little could have had even that destroyed is very sad. There are many channels for readers to help by giving whatever they can spare – the Red Cross in your country is a good place to start and other similar NGO’s are on the ground.

The New Zealand government sent aircraft with supplies and military personnel to assist, and the US Navy is on station to provide what assistance they can as well. Many other governments are sending assistance.

If you can spare a few dollars, then please do so and donate it to one of the funds helping to bring relief to the Philippines and the warm and friendly people who live there. Any amount will make a difference.

If you are a photographer, consider taking a trip there as soon as it is safe to do so. My friends at Jim Cline Phototours have trips there which are fantastic, and by going there and spending your dollars in restaurants, jeepneys and hotels, you will be contributing to the recovery and getting some great images.

Exhibition Going Well

Aside from a couple of days where the Roaring Forties have made it impossible to put the work up safely, the exhibition is going well.

Many very enthusiastic and positive comments have been received which is great to hear as it is always nice to know that your work is appreciated and getting noticed. Some of the images are quite challenging and those who take a few minutes to really see and think about what they are seeing will be rewarded. They take you on a journey to places few will see in the course of typical holiday visits and so on. One comment a number of people made to me was that they were amazed at how happy everyone seemed to be despite living in circumstances that most of us would not wish to find ourselves in. I think this says something quite important about what is actually important in life in order to be happy but I don’t want to colour your thoughts if you have yet to pop along and see the work.

It remains up until the end of the day on Monday in the Square at Martinborough so if you are over to enjoy the food and wine here for the Labour Day weekend, I hope you will find the time to go and see it.

iPhone shot of a man enjoying the exhibition and the sun.

Interviewed On Radio New Zealand National by Brian Crump.

Last night I did something that I have never done before – a live radio interview!

I was interviewed by Brian Crump for the Our Own Odysseys segment of his early evening show ‘Nights’. Every Tuesday he talks with a Kiwi who has a travel tale to tell and last night that Kiwi was me. We talked about the Revolution concept and the trip itself; in particular, Brian was surprised to hear about the size of the land mine problem remaining in Cambodia when I spoke with him about my visit to cover a Halo Trust clearance project near the Thai border (see photograph below).

If you would like to listen, the interview is available here.

Land mine awaiting disposal in Cambodia

A Week To Go

After being on the road for almost 9 weeks, living out of one trusty duffle (thanks, Red Oxx, for keeping my gear safe and sound) and one trusty camera travel bag (a Lowepro Magnum 400AW if anyone wants to know!) the thought of my condensed world suddenly re-expanding to my house, office, kitchen, pantry, car and so on is something I am both welcoming and ambivalent about at the same time.

Rolf Potts, in his great travel book “Vagabonding: The Art Of Long Term Travel”, wrote that coming home was often the hardest part of being away for long periods. I do not recall his exact words – and my copy of the book is in NZ so I hope that he will forgive my paraphrasing – but he said something along the lines of when you get home, no one will care that you got in a fight with a Javanese transvestite or that you were drinking until sunup on a deserted white sand beach with friends you met on a bus just yesterday, because those who were not there have stayed firmly in their Comfort Zones.

My late father encouraged his children to travel widely, believing that it did indeed broaden the mind and was a Good Thing. I’ve always agreed with him and I know that he would have been fascinated by many of the things I would have been able to tell him about this trip. I have no doubt that he would have been interested in playing the new Nick Faldo golf course near Angkor Wat. Such is progress, apparently.

I hope my posts here have allowed readers to travel in their armchairs and share some of the the things I have seen. I’ve still got more shooting to do this week before I leave then 2 months of preparation for the Kokomai Exhibition in October. If you can’t make it to the Exhibition (and it will be worth it!), once the Kokomai festival is over I will be looking for a way to reproduce it online as best as it can be done, so that you can see it too from wherever you are.

Cow Boy
A young Khmer boy brings his family cows home at the end of the working day.

Oops! This Khmer lady was planting rice and slipped over in the mud – she could hardly stop laughing!

Pol Pot’s Mark

As most will know, the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot in the 1970’s in which 25% of the population were killed, was one of the most dark periods of 20th century history.

Today I visited Wat Thmey, a working Buddhist monastery sited on what was one of the infamous Killing Fields. The monastery today is a school, an orphanage and a memorial to the people who died in the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

The monastery is not as dark and foreboding as you might expect such a place to be; Cambodians on the whole are a happy people and the monks are no different, despite their calling. I joked with one or two of them today, who were larking about and making a joke out of the fact that almost everyone they meet wants to photograph them (it’s something about the orange of the robes, I think! If they adopted the dull brown habit of the average Christian monastic order, I don’t think tourists would take half as many photographs of them).

Whilst I may have photographed them in other circumstances, I had just taken (amongst others) the images below and I am sure you will agree they are sobering to say the least. The skulls and other bones in the memorial were carefully collected by local people and represent a memorial to all those who died under Pol Pot’s communist regime.

Cambodia has done an admirable job of moving forward from such a dark past and the people today are friendly and amongst the most welcoming you will find in SE Asia. The Wheel of Life has certainly turned to a better phase for them.

Wat Thmey Reflected in the Killing Fields Faces

Killing Fields Memorial

The Battle of Long Tan – An ANZAC Legend

Yesterday I visited a Vietnam War site that has a strong Kiwi and Australian attachment. The site of the Battle of Long Tan.

I was taken round by ‘Breaker’ Cusack, an Aussie now living in the region and who was there at the time as a soldier and was the Duty Officer at the Battalion Operations Centre on the afternoon of the battle, so has a pretty vivid account to share.

The battle took place on 18 August 1966. D Coy 6 RAR engaged approximately 2500 enemy combatants with fire support from the NZ 161 battery. In the aftermath of the battle the following day it was discovered that 18 Australian ANZACs made the ultimate sacrifice, 24 were wounded and the enemy losses numbered 245 dead and 350 wounded.

Now a very quiet area mainly covered in rubber trees, the area of the battle is marked with a simple white cross. Well maintained by Breaker and his mates, the site is clean and tidy. We left poppies for the ANZACS and lit incense for the Vietnamese. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

Our thanks to Breaker for his thoroughly interesting tour and for all the work he and his colleagues do to keep the site tidy and the memories alive.

A farmer passes the former Ops Room of NZ 161 Battery, Long Tan area

The memorial plaque on the Long Tan Cross

The ANZAC memorial at the site of the Battle of Long Tan

Cebu

So I have finally managed to find five minutes and a (barely) working email connection to post this update on what I have been doing for the past days in the Philippines.

I’ve been travelling in Cebu with ace photojournalist Karl Grobl and visiting some amazing sites and picking up some great learning along the way. Karl often works here and has ferreted out some amazing places to explore and capture breathtaking images. I will tell you about two of them here.

Santa Mesa Underpass Community
Under a rail bridge in a suburb of Manila a group of unrelated peope have been brought together by their common need for shelter and security in numbers. Living in a mishmash of ‘homes’ made from assorted oddments, alongside two rail tracks and framed by highways with Jeepneys and so on driving through regularly to compliment the trains that run past every 20 minutes to boot.
We visited these people who were pleased to see us and did not seem to mind at all being documented. Here are a couple of images to give you an idea of how these people live.

Packing & Sorting Charcoal By Hand For Sale In The Market

This infant was born under the bridge, not in a hospital. He is sleeping on an old door in a motorcycle sidecar.

Flores Boxing Gym
Later in the week I visited a very small boxing gym called Flores Boxing Gym in Mandaue City. Four times a week, young men come to the gym to train and spar with one another under the guidance of Brix Florez, himself a talented boxer. Once again we were welcomed into the private world of people who barely knew us from Adam and made to feel welcome as well as being given priveleged access to photograph their workouts.

Fighters sparring at the gym

A fighter works the heavy bag in the gym

I leave for Vietnam again in a few days and have to say that I find myself surpised by how reluctant I am to leave the Philippines. I am sure I will return.

I will be meeting up with Karl again in Cambodia for a few days to do some very focussed one-on-one mentoring and shooting and of course you will be able to read about that here on the blog too!

The Journey Within The Journey

Location map of the Philippines Equirectangular projection, N/S stretching 103 %. Geographic limits of the map: N: 21.2° N S: 4.3° N W: 114.1° E E: 127.3° E (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, OK – one of them. I feel that there will be several, both literal and figurative.

The one in question is 6 days in the Philippines that I am spending with US humanitarian photojournalist Karl Grobl. Karl has a style that I really like as well as a huge amount of experience in the NGO and humanitarian workspace. I was originally planning to attend a 2 week workshop with Karl and as I wrote here that was cancelled as not enough folks signed up for it. If you take a look at his website, I am sure you will be impressed with the excellent work there.

I’m now meeting up with Karl for the optional 5 day extension of his Philippines trip. The extension is geared more towards actual photojournalism practice rather than just a photo travel tour. I have also been fortunate enough to arrange to spend an extra day on my own with Karl, which will be a really useful opportunity. When I planned that part of the trip, I was not even aware of the Magnum Photos workshop in Sydney which I am now very fortunate to be attending in just over 2 weeks time.

I have no doubt that both learning experiences will be quite different but equally beneficial and am very much looking forward to stretching myself and my creative abilities. Clients and those who come and see the exhibition in October will be the beneficiaries of these formal journeys of learning which themselves form part of the wheel of life in terms of my learning and growth as a professional photographer.

I will be posting about both these workshops here at Revolution. However, if you have any questions or comments I’d be happy to help if I can.

The Journey Before The Journey: Magnum Workshop, Sydney, Australia, May 20-24th (revolutionblog.net)

So Why Re-Invent The Wheel? Part 2

As I said in Part 1 of this two part post, I have been asked why I chose this particular focus.

To remind you, I started out with a very broad focus, wanting to look at the human face of progress after conflict in SE Asia. As the project developed, I began to realise that I could not realistically encompass that broad a subject into a single meaningful body of work that would make sense to the viewer.

In SE Asia, Buddhism is one of the most common religions and in Buddhism the Wheel of Life is an important tenet of belief. So that more spiritual form of wheel was also in my mind when I was thinking about what to name the project. The Wheel of Life is a mandala – a complex picture representing the Buddhist view of the universe.

Officially, Vietnam is an atheist country although Buddhism is one of six religions officially recognised there; Cambodia is principally Buddhist and the Philippines predominantly Christian although Buddhism is practiced there also.

I think that the concept of the Wheel of Life is something most people can at least understand and conceptually it works well to illustrate the cyclical nature of human history, with SE Asia moving around the figurative wheel from an area of conflict to an area of peace and prosperity. The boundary between the two is where I want to find my images.

I also wanted something that would work well over a variety of media as well as being suitable as a title for the exhibition in October. It is a challenge to think of something that will work on websites, on posters, in magazine articles, in advertisements and in books – perhaps even on T Shirts.

English: The Bhavacakra (Sanskrit; Devanagari: भवचक्र; Pali: bhavacakka) or Wheel of Becoming is a symbolic representation of continuous existence proces in the form of a circle, used primarily in Tibetan Buddhism. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you are reading this and have any thoughts about what other wheel related subjects I might seek in SE Asia, please feel free to chime in below in the ‘Comments’ and let me know what you think!

Posts Tagged ‘Wheel of Life’

In early November, Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines causing major loss of life and damage to property. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without adequate food, shelter, sanitation and medical assistance.

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