Glimpses of India

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

India | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

I LOVE travel!!! The sights, the smells, the sounds, the tastes... The sacred & the profane, the rare & the mundane all thrill me. I love the details of ordinary life that gives character to a place, & the extraordinary things that imbue it with its particular spirit. From the backstreets of a city, catching glimpses of unadorned life, to landscapes in isolated places that give rise to the myths & customs of a culture. I love old traditions being lived out in time-honoured ways, or juxtaposed with new ones, embraced in a different way by a changing world.
As I travel I record - in diaries &, of course, visually. I can't stop myself from taking photos of all the wonderful/bizarre/ordinary/ridiculous things I see. Photography is my way of SEEING.
In India, as usual, I wanted to capture unguarded moments in peoples lives - saddhus cooking a simple meal, a man casually chatting with neighbours in a suburban street, a woman showing appreciation to buskers, washing hanging in the privacy of "backyards", the inside of someones simple yet ethereally-lovely home. Glimpses. Vignettes of a culture.
Funnily enough, this competition caught my eye because Bhutan is next on my list of travel destinations. Buddhism, traditional culture, stunning landscapes & Middle-Earth forests is a combination too potent to resist. A seemingly mythical land filled with natural beauty, and apparently-removed from modern times.Right up my alley!
Living in New Guinea as a child probably began my passion for the exotic & the beauteous. It was a natural & cultural paradise. Pre-teens I travelled with my parents in Europe, where they'd come from. As an adult I've travelled in the US, Mexico, Guatemala, Trinidad, China, India, Bali, Thailand, Laos, Italy. There's still so much wondrous stuff to see.........