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Cors des Alpes
Cors des Alpes A concert with two alpine horns and two accordions in an old Hydro Power Plant in the Rhône, where the river flows out of Lake Geneva. Very original, as for the music, the instruments and the location.The musicians played arrangements of old baroque compositions and more recent pieces specially composed for these…
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Fellow villagers
Fellow villagers Two Kumaoni women attending the wedding of a girl in the village. Lives lived in the lap of nature and culture in the foothills of the Himalaya. Photo of the week: Wedding guests, Maat village, Almora, Kumaon, Uttarakhand India 2020
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Folding child
Folding child Neatly folded up,mouth above the plate.Nothing spilled. Photo of the week: Mayoli Organic farm, Mayoli, Uttarakhand, India 2021
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Surya
Surya A stream of men, women and childrenmeanders between the Surya temple shrines.A thousand years, day after day, ever different,always the same, as the sun that comes and goes.Aeons … a millennium … today. Photo of the week: Surya (Sun) temple, 9th cent. AD, Katarmal, Uttarakhand, India 2021
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Uttarayani Fair
Uttarayani Fair When Surya (Sun) enters the Capricorn zodiac (14 January) it’s time for the festival of Makar Sankranti, in Uttarakhand also known as Uttarayan. That’s the time when the town of Bageshwar, at the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, really comes to life. The biggest mela (fair) of the year in the…
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A wall in Kazimierz
A wall in Kazimierz Broken, mutilated, spread around in disarray,dug up from layers of dust and sand: memory fragments of the departed,fit together as a jigsaw puzzle. Memorial wall to the dead,for the eyes of the living. Photo of the week: 16th cent. Jewish R’emuh Cemetery wall, Kazimierz, Krakow, Poland 2007
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Memento mori
Memento mori When walking around in a graveyard we may be content of still belonging to the realm of the living, but it also inevitably reminds us of our own mortality. This is certainly the case in the graveyard of the Portuguese Jews near Amsterdam. Many of the gravestones carry images that denote death: an…
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Anno Mundi 5490
Anno Mundi 5490 The Jewish cemetery at ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’ near Amsterdam is called Beth Haim which means House of Life. This tells us something about the Sephardim philosophy of life – and death. The picture shows a detail of a partly submerged gravestone in which we see a shepherdess with her cattle. A…
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Watery grave
Watery grave I saw this sculpted marble gravestone at the cemetery of the Portuguese Jewish community in ‘Ouderkerk aan de Amstel’. The Sephardim Jews had started settling in Amsterdam in the 16th century and their cemetery in nearby Ouderkerk dates from 1614. I used to pass and visit it regularly on my walks along the…
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Death and decay
Death and decay Two headstones, one a bit more pointed than the other, are each covering a corner of two gothic church windows, one a bit more pointed than the other. A harmonious rhythm of corresponding forms that subconsciously may have caught my eye. But I took the picture in the first place because I…
