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Pure landscapes
Pure landscapes Standing in the middle of a beautiful landscape can be a profound experience. The wide vistas allow us to feel the immensity of space, and the sense of the earth upon which we live. This sensation is intensified also by the quality of the sounds we hear; sounds of animals or human beings…
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The hotel room
The “welcome” poster in last week’s photo wouldn’t have looked unbecoming here either. I once spent a night in this room and I do remember it. I had reached Haldwani station in the middle of the night and found the town immersed in complete darkness due to a power cut. With difficulty I found somebody…
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The waiting room
The waiting room In spite of the wide open iron grid doors, the “welcome” poster on the wall doesn’t look like an altogether superfluous encouragement for possible visitors stepping over the threshold of this waiting room. The contrast between place and poster must have struck me as strangely funny when I passed here on the…
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Where I stand
After my comments in the previous posts on the Fall of man and Redemption of man, you may like to know where I stand. Well, I’m standing here under this tree and look up and think it’s beautiful. Through our observations of nature, and our thoughts and studies, we have come to a certain understanding…
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Redemption of man
or the cross in the mountains If God is in the detail (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”, Aby Warburg), then he is more present in the fly on the cross than in the man who’s nailed to it. I, at least, have always marvelled at the fly that is taking a rest on the…
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Fall of man
Adam and Eve, thrown out of paradise by an angry god. What had they done wrong? They had committed the first, original sin. They had eaten the fruits from ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ which god had explicitly forbidden. As a consequence the first man and woman lost their innocence and they…
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Silent witnesses
When I walked between the old Khmer monuments of a thousand years ago, the guardian deities with their introverted faces on the gopuras looking out over the land in the four directions, I couldn’t help seeing them as silent witnesses of the horror that had swept the country of Cambodia only a few decades ago.…
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New life, new hope
What does the boy in the picture see, what does he feel, what associations does he have while looking at the woman-statue? His apparent intensive look and the way he holds the woman by the arm, suggests she makes him think of his mother or another close family member. He seems particularly intrigued by her…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror could slowly start picking up the bits and pieces of what was left of their lives. With a quarter of the population dead, almost every family had lost several of its loved ones.…
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Derailment of the mind
This is how I tend to look at people who are guided in their thinking and actions by extreme fanaticism. But one might as well say that the fanatic mind is not derailed; on the contrary, it perceives only one rail, only one track to a certain end which it follows with blinkers on, insensitive…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 