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Pillars of strength
That’s what they are, the working poor of India! Especially the women. Without their constant effort and care the entire structure of society would collapse in no time. Prone to exploitation and even bondage, these migrant workers in the brick kilns have one advantage over their middle class masters. Their physically demanding work in relative…
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Happy new year
Hope you’ve all made a kiss landing into the year 2015 Photo of the week: Prague, Czech Republic 2007
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White elephant
Sometimes you meet after many years an old acquaintance who greets you with the exclamation “You haven’t changed a single bit!” The same applies to the Indian Ambassador car. Since its birth in 1957 as a clone of Morris Oxford its looks have hardly changed during all those years that it has been in production. But the “sick…
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Mind your step
Everyone who has moved around airports must be familiar with this phrase “Mind your step”. Seeing it, I immediately hear the proper voice with the right intonation warning me: “Mind your step!” But what is it supposed to mean here? Can it be a warning to those who are on the verge of leaving the…
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Blue Planet Sky
So this is what the girl in last week’s post saw through her camera, or rather it’s what I saw through my camera. Looking at the sky can be a nice activity, especially when there is some movement of clouds. Looking at the sky through a fixed frame is even more interesting. It makes you…
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Two-way masks
And what does the girl with the camera see up there? The answer to that has to wait till next week’s post. Here I’m interested in the girl with the mask, sitting in this spotlessly clean environment. I always thought that these worker’s masks were meant to protect oneself against fine dust and other unhealthy particles that can…
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The Swimming Pool
This pool owes its alienating effect to the fact that it’s actually only a baby pool with hardly 10 cm of water on a transparent floor under which people can walk by. It is a work of art by Leandro Erlich in the Museum of Contemporary Art at Kanazawa. I used the photo in my film…
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Gimcracks and knickknacks
or: a girl’s paradise An entire shop full of trinkets against a background of pink wall cloth and a tiger-like stripe pattern on the floor: a truly mouth-watering temptation! In Dutch we have the nice word ‘snuisterijen’ for this kind of trinkets, containing the two vowel sounds ‘ui’ and ‘ij’ that non-native speakers always find hard…
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Under the Sony roof
Why this photo pleases me: The proportion and partition of light and dark parts within the frame of the picture create a strong, graphic image. The straight lines and their angles versus the curved shape of the roof create a pleasant tension. The fact that the dark part on the lower right seems to be a true multistory…
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Moloch horridus
This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of the Genus…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 