Category: Photos

A study in stillness.

Walking around the MG Road area of Bangalore with a Zenit E loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400 film. There’s something about this combination that reduces photography to its essence – walk about, see something interesting, pull up camera, focus, frame, click shutter and wait until you see the result.

Never too early to catch up on the news.

The quintessential Japanese balance, I thought: to surrender all of yourself to an illusion, and yet somewhere, in some part of yourself, to know all the while that it is an illusion.

Pico Iyer

After dinner, the junior monk asks me if he can see my photographs.

—Of course, Kawamura-san.
—On my day off, I wander around Koyasan and take photos.
He flicks through the photos.
—Where did you take this?
—Kyoto, I was walking around in Gion
—It is a masterpiece

With that he bows, gives me the camera and walks away. Now I am all consumed by thoughts about why the Zen master found this photograph to be a masterpiece. Ironically, this is happening in a place where one is taught to let go of such things. I wonder if the roshii said what he said deliberately.

I’d seen countless pictures of Fuji-san, but nothing quite prepares one to the majesty when you see her up close. On the shores of Lake Kawaguchi-ko, most people were busy taking selfies against the mountain. A little away from this narcissism, I found a quiet spot among the low rocks and reeds to just gaze. The eye and mind wandered among the snow line, the faint high ridges and the pine trees at the bottom.

I set up the camera for a 2 min long exposure and sat down. The wind, coming down from the snow and given more life by the water, was very cold.

I closed my eyes and listened. Nearby, a pair of wading ducks disturbed the reeds. Behind me, a French couple trying to take a selfie, but never finding the right angle. A little out in the low rocks, a Japanese photographer trying to wedge his tripod and in the far distance, the discordant shouts of a group of Chinese.

Sometimes, the act of photography is as much a receptacle for sound as it is for a visual.

The politics of Assam is as murky and complicated as the Brahmaputra’s channels and meandering ways.

Moin-ud Din, who took us out on his boat on the hunt for river dolphins (successfully at that) faces an uncertain future in the only place he’s ever known. His father and grandfather are from Mymensingh in Bangladesh. They entered the country in the violence and confusion of 1971 and have remained since. Both father and son speak fluent Axomi, ply their trade well and are as integrated as anyone else living here.

But both of their names are missing from the citizenship registry. Despite many attempts they haven’t been able to get on it. And with a new bill coming that disqualifies any migrant who’s not a Hindu, the entire family might have nowhere to go. “I live on fringes, sir. If not here, somewhere else. Things don’t change for the likes of me and my people. You’ll be you and I’ll be me.”

On my final morning in Kaziranga National Park, we found this male Great Indian Hornbill foraging and feeding the fruit right above us. We sat and watched him and he in turn gave us curious glances, but hunger ruled, so after a while he ignored us and kept doing what he was doing.

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”

Rest in peace, Mary Oliver. You make me float above this difficult world and be dazzled by it.

I took Nan Shepard’s words to heart this year:

Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness.

From the shores of Chandratal, Spiti.