PixelatedImage Blog

Join Jeffrey Chapman and I in Oaxaca, Mexico for a one-week photographic adventure a little closer to home than the workshops I’ve done until now. Focused on the Day of the Dead festivities, this workshop will sell out quickly. We usually sell-out within a day or two, and most of our workshops are much further away, so this one will go even faster.

I’m on the road in Oregon right now and internet time is sparse and used for more personal updates on the trip with Jessie, but if you want more on this fantastic workshop, and the last one I’ll be leading in 2011, then follow this link HERE, or click the image above.

Dates are October 29 – November 5, 2011. The rough itinerary is below and all other details are on the website linked above. See you there!

The Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) is an important traditional holiday in Mexico. Family and friends gather to remember, pray for and celebrate friends and family members who have died. Traditions connected with the holiday include building elaborate alters honoring the deceased, using sugar skulls, marigolds and other favorite foods and beverages of the departed. The intent is is to encourage visits by the souls, so that the souls will hear the prayers and comments of the living directed to them. The modern version of this celebration dates its origins to the indigenous observances of thousands of years ago and to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl, who was depicted with a skull-like face on may artifacts. In Aztec mythology, she is Queen of the Underworld and keeps watch over the bones of the dead.

We will photograph in the markets as people make their purchases for all that is needed for the decoration of the altars of the dead and the corresponding festivities, which are both serious as well as jovial. We will photograph in several cemeteries as well as the parades (comparsas). We will also photograph the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Oaxaca’s historic center and the archeological site of Monte Albán.

This photographic adventure is in the spirit of the best-selling Within The Frame. It is a tour about the passionate discovery and photography of people, place and culture, with emphasis given to going deep not wide, and pursuing that most elusive of photographic necessities—our vision.

Day One — Oaxaca
Arrive in Oaxaca, meet-and-greet dinner, orientation and prepare to begin the photo expedition the following morning.

Day Two — TLACOLULA, MITLA & TEOTITLáN DEL VALLE
After breakfast we will head to the town of Tlacolula for one of the Oaxaca Valley’s oldest and largest markets. We will also visit the town’s main church, the Parroquia de la Virgen de la Asunción, which dates from 1531. From Tlacolula we will head to Mitla, an archeological and UNESCO World Heritage Site that was once home to approximately 10,000 during its peak around 1350. Mitla means “Place of the Dead” and was the principal ceremonial center of the Zapotecs. On our way back to Oaxaca, we will stop in the village of Teotitlán del Valle, where nearly every family is involved in weaving wool on traditional hand looms, a tradition that dates to pre-Hispanic times.

Day Three — OAXACA, XOXOCOTLáN & SANTA MARíA ATZOMPA
We will spend the day exploring the historic center of Oaxaca and the impromptu Day of the Dead celebrations, with live bands, that invariably meander their way through the streets of Oaxaca. In the evening we will visit the Old Cemetery of Xoxocotlán, where many of the Day of the Dead altars are decorated with the same items that were used on the ancient Zapotec tombs in Monte Alban. If we feel like moving on to another cemetery, then we will go to the village of Atzompa, where residents hold candlelight vigil in the cemetery from around 11pm until dawn.

Day Four — OAXACA, COMPARSA SAN AGUSTíN ETLA & OAXACA SAN MIGUEL CEMETERY
The daytime will be devoted to exploring more of historic Oaxaca. In the evening we will visit the Day of the Dead parade in San Agustín and then Oaxaca’s San Miguel Cemetery.

Day Five — MONTE ALBáN & SAN FILIPE DEL AGUA CEMETERY
In the morning, we’ll visit Monte Albán, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Oaxaca Valley that was the capital of the Zapotecs from around 500 BCE to 750 CE. In the evening we will visit the San Filipe del Agua cemetery.

Day Six — ZAACHILA & CUILAPAN DE GUERRERO
Every Thursday, thousands of Zapotec-speaking villagers stream into Zaachila to sell, buy and socialize at the weekly market. After spending some time enjoying the market we’ll visit the unfinished Ex-Convento de Santiago in Cuilapan de Guerrero.

Day Seven — Oaxaca
On our last full day in Oaxaca we will return to the Mercado Juárez and many of the beautiful colonial buildings, including the Catedral de Oaxaca (on the Zócalo), the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad and the Templo de Santo Domingo.

Day Eight — Oaxaca
The morning can be spent exploring more of Oaxaca’s historic center before its time to say our goodbyes to this beautiful city.

I wrote this earlier this year to stave off the insanity of jet-lag one night while on a particularly challenging assignment in Ethiopia. It’s a little stream-of-consciousness and I offer it for what it is. In my defence, my mind was a little foggy from the jet-lag. If you’re looking for wisdom, move along – nothing to see here. The photograph above was shot in Northern Ethiopia – Gonder, to be precise, back in 2006.

I’m jet-lagged. It’s 9:30 in the evening. I’ve just accidentally slept through the afternoon and woken up to the realization that there’s no chance I’ll get another wink of sleep between now and my 5am wake up call. I’m in a hotel room that redefines mediocre, in a hotel at which I stayed 2 years ago and of which I have unkind memories. I was here with a friend visiting an orphanage and had developed a sore in my mouth which made eating so painful I wanted to cry. Mike refused to challenge the roaches on their claim to the shower. Good times, as they say.

These are the nights I don’t tell people about when they tell me I’ve got the best job in the world. These nights of restlessness in crappy-ass hotels, listening to disco hammering its way in from the streets, longing for home, stressing out about the coming days on an assignment that seems doomed from the get-go. Nights spent trying to stay positive, to not wonder about the parasitic possibilities latent in the mosquito bites the net was meant to prevent. Nights hoping the bug-bite on your eyelid doesn’t swell your eye completely, forcing you to shoot with the other one, the one that doesn’t “see” any better than a teenaged photographer with his first roll of film and an AE-1.

I’ve plugged in my iPod, played Toto’s requisite Africa over and over again, before moving on to Paul Simon’s African-inspired Graceland album. I’ll settle, slow down, move on to Van Morrison, and find my groove, work on the book I’ve been chipping away at, more to avoid getting morose and thinking about how badly I want to sleep this night away, get in the truck and keep moving, get to the location and fix this mess.

I’m meant to be here for 5 days of shooting and the local NGO has policies about transportation that mean I won’t be on location until late Monday afternoon, will have two days to shoot, and then turn around and repeat the 2-day drive back to Addis Ababa and the plane that could have been booked 2 days further out if only we had been told of this policy. It’s no big deal, they pay me, I do what I can, I go home. But the thing is, I care deeply about this work and want to see it go well. It’s a new client and I want to knock this one out of the ballpark. Now the game’s been cut dramatically short and my bat’s been cut in two.

The reason I keep doing this, time after time, is in part because I love the adventure. I keep saying that as long as I make it out alive I come back with a good story and in the circles I move a good story is like currency, any evening spent together with other travelling photographer inevitably ends with an escalating vortex of stories that begin with “when I was in Serbia,” and “How many times have you had malaria?” before finishing with the usual bullshit about how we shot an assignment through the haze of a fever and a camera that was permanently stuck on 1/250. As evenings go, you could do far far worse, but you only get to play if you have the stories. So bring it on, you say, though dreading the thought that the fates might just take you at your word.

I also do it because I love the kids. The humanitarian organizations for whom I work specialise in development that focuses on children and my time with the kids and families in some of the more remote places on the planet, is deeply gratifying. Where it not for the kids, were I coming down only to shoot the installation of a new water pump, I’d give it up entirely, try my hand at writing perhaps. The kids keep me coming back. This is why I shoot. I tell others to shoot their passion, and this is why – it sustains you, makes your work better, and gives the challenge a payoff that money alone could never do.

It’s past midnight now; four and a half hours to kill until the alarm goes off. Nights like this it’s hard not to think about home and the last time I saw my wife and the sushi we had the night before I left. Hard not to think about my morning ritual of a coffee and bagel by the ocean before going back to work, or the days when there’s writing to be done and I walk to the water taxi and take the brief ride across False Creek,  under the steelwork of the Burrard Bridge, before stepping off at Granville Island, and walking to my favourite coffee joint. Hard? Hell, it’s impossible not to think about those things.

But in the morning, when the sun comes up and I step out into the dawn and the dust & diesel smell of Ethiopia, and into the Land Cruiser to continue our two-day trek through the breathtaking Bale Mountains before making the descent into the remote lowlands on the Kenyan border, all these thoughts get washed away by the thrill of movement, of new sights and smell and the epic feeling of being a million miles from email and the pseudo-obligations of the busy busy busy routine.

Thank God, on these nights, for Van Morrison. I’ve been thinking about listening to every song on my ipod and counting how many times he says “Jelly Roll”. Despite it all I’d rather, right now, truly be nowhere else. And in 4 days, on the other end of this trip, when I wrestle with jet-lag at this same hotel on the way back to Addis, I’ll be wide awake, but thinking about the Ethiopians I met, the stories I’ve heard & been a part of, and the hope I’ve witnessed. I’ll be looking at images that didn’t exist before this adventure began, and the sleepless nights in a $9/night hotel with the cess-pool bathroom won’t seem so bad. Man I love this job…

I shot these (click to enlarge) over an early breakfast while on assignment in Bangladesh recently. Our breakfast joint was no more than a hole in the wall off the main street, we’d go in at dawn, somewhere between the rising volume of the morning call to prayer and the sun coming up hot and fast. Halfway through our first plates of roti, dahl, and eggs, the sun would peak through the door and sidelight the steam from the fresh roti. And by the time I finished shooting, my meal was cold. I looked forward to these mornings, it’s rare that the light and the food is so good all at once, the shooting-grounds only inches from my breakfast plate.

I look at these frames now and they seem so serene, no hints whatsoever of the buidling chaos and noise in the streets, as though the moment the sun awakes all the horns in the city wake up and begin their incessant din until long after the sun’s gone down on the other side of day. And in those hours we’d be miles away, in small villages tucked up against the Indian border, photographing children and families, listening to stories of how elephants trampled their home, and how they’ve rebuilt and moved on. I shake my head alot on these trips.

The quality and direction of light while shooting food is absolutely crucial. Watching it play in this man’s kitchen morning after morning gave me a renewed appreciation for the subtleties of light, not only from one hour to the next, but from one minute, one moment, to the next. You turn and it’s gone. I love this about our craft, playing with something so intangible, so fleeting.

Biratnagar, Nepal. 2008

This was one of those important days. The ones you remember forever. It was one of those days that give you an abiding sense of hope.

It was also one of those days you work really hard – the heat and humidity had soaked through all my clothes, I had chemical burns on a finger and thumb from slipping on the squat toilet and placing my hand in cleanser that morning, and the sun was so bright it made for tough shooting. But it was impossible to complain, to do anything but get on with the job and be deeply grateful that my work is so rewarding, and is accomplished without once putting 50lbs of bricks on my head.

This gal works harder than I ever will in a liftetime of working. Hours a day at the brick kiln carrying loads of 3kg bricks on her head, eight at a time, back and forth under incredible heat. She was, is, a child laborer.

She’s also confident, has a beautiful smile and is working on her education and starting a small business. She’s the reason I feel great hope for places like Nepal. In a culture of passive acceptance of the fates, she’s grabbing her future with great tenacity. Children like her, and all the children I spent time with in Nepal, inspire me, humble me.

I’m posting this with the kind permission of the girl, who I am leaving unnamed, and of World Education Nepal for whom I shot this image. Big thanks again to Sraddha, one of the most capable, and fun, producers/clients I have worked with.

Some photographs you just love for the stories that surround them and not merely for the ones within the frame. This is one of those. It was taken in Douz, Tunisia, on the northern edge of the Sahara.

It was taken in the midst of some frustration; my expectations had once again got in the way of my seeing things clearly and I wasn’t shooting with a clear mind or eye.

When I shot this I had no idea that the following night would be spent shivering in a French military-issue sleeping bag from WW2 while listening to the snoring and farting of my traveling companion and the camels outside the tent. I had lost my Moleskine notebook the day before, and the following morning I would be tossed unceremoniously off my camel.

I had no idea that two days later I would spend an evening searching out a hammam in Sfax only to be massaged and scrubbed so vigorously I would emerge with the turkish-bath equivalent of rug burn so bad it later scabbed over, and some emotional scarring from the incident.

Nor did I know that I would shrug off a helpful local’s warnings about “les maisons de tolerance” and wander into a one-way alley that comprised Sfax’s decidedly down-market red-light district. I discovered it was one-way only after walking the length of it and fending off the advances of the old, the ugly, and the cross-dressed, only to turn the corner, walk into a wall and have to turn around and run the gauntlet again. I can still feel a finger, wet with what I desperately hoped was saliva, being run across the back of my neck by a woman (I think it was a woman) with twice my age, weight, and facial hair. After a shower the whole thing become much funnier. Kind of.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We just never know. And while the photographs I take mean a great deal to me, they won’t ever be a replacement for the experiences that wrap around them and give them so much meaning for me. Don’t mistake photographing life for experiencing it.

Northern Ethiopia, January 2006

I’m tempted to tell you this photograph has nearly nothing to do with me. It was shot, one of three frames, from the window of our beat-up Land Cruiser without slowing down. I saw the scene, knew there was no way I could get it, but tried all the same because I’m sometimes stubborn that way. Rightly, a great many of my images ought to be credited to a fast shutter and serendipity. In fact, I’d probably have a good deal more shots like this if I just got out of the way more often.

Trouble is, I think too much. I can give you twenty reasons a shot won’t work before I get the camera to my eye, and in so doing I lose out on moments like this that “would never work.” Often my thinking is a help – it works hand-in-hand with my intuition and complements the touch-feely or artsy-fartsy side. It’s helpful when dealing with technical things, like removing the lenscap. But give it a little room to move, give it too much license to control the process and suddenly there’s a hundred un-shot frames and my inspiration never gets a word in edge-wise. Think too much and the decisive moment is gone before you can react. And then the analytical side and the emotional side (the geek and the artist) are both unhappy with you and they take off for a bar and some single malt scotch to try to forget about you for a while.

I think as we grow up as photographers, as we “mature,” we lose a childlike willingness to experiment, to fail wildly, to try something for the sake of seeing what happens. I used to lie on my tummy with my old Pentax Spotmatic and a bellows unit and shoot out-of-focus raindrops on grass just to see what it looked like. And that was back when I paid for every precious frame of film.

Still, I’m glad it turned out as it did. We spent so much time in that Land Cruiser, saw so many children smiling, waving, running after us yelling “You, You, You, Youyouyouyouyou…” that this scene is as much about Ethiopia to me as some of the images I worked much harder for. More so because the two figures are children, and girls at that. Dotted all over the countryside you’ll see them carrying their jerry cans of water, large loads of twigs and firewood making them ant-like in proportion. More than 50% of the population of Ethiopia, like most sub-Saharan countries in Africa, are children. Many of them orphans. Still they smile, still they wave.

God, I miss Ethiopia.

Exif: Canon 20D, 17-40/4.0L @17mm, 1/1600 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400. Probably needs me to open it again in Lightroom and re-process it for better midtones.

February 2008, Mongolia.

This is one in a series of shots of this little boy that I return to over and over again. He packed more energy and personality into his little frame than any child I’ve met, and I’ve met many, many children. He had a look in his eyes from the moment we started that said “put your seat-belt on, Photo-man, because you are my plaything today and I am going to exhaust you before you can crank out 100 frames on your fancy camera. Think your camera focuses pretty fast, don’tcha?” And then the sugar kicked in, red-lined, and I started earning my keep. Eventually we wrapped him in that blanket like a burrito to slow him down. It didn’t.

What you do not see is the sparse frozen hillside and the pervasive smog of Ulaan Batar’s many coal-burning powerplants under which his family’s borrowed ger (yurt) tent sits. You do not see the poverty. I framed it that way because he doesn’t see it either, so pre-occupied was he with growing up, imagining that he was Spiderman, and chasing his beleaguered German Shepherd puppy. This little boy had great hope, imagination, and kindness. He almost came home in my duffle bag.

Almost anytime I speak of my job with others they ask how heartbreaking and difficult it is, and to be honest there are few trips that don’t find me lying in bed one night with tears rolling into my ears as I stare at the ceiling. But it’s equally true that on these journeys the time I spend with the poor teaches me more about those things I could never buy – hope, dignity, strength, even joy.

Exif: Canon EOS 5D, 24070/2.8l at 38mm, ISO 100, 1/100, f/7.0

Photograph taken for, and property of World Vision.

January 2007, Nizzamudin, Delhi, INDIA

This is one of the first images I shot in what has come to be my favourite countries. India is, simply, an astonishing place.

This is the shrine at Nizzamudin, a Suffi place of worship and one of the more magical places I’ve ever been. It’s a place where you can easily lose time and space and truly forget when and where you are. I was there with Matt Brandon – another first – and as he led me into this space I watched him speak with vendors and stall-keepers in his fluent Urdu, feeling very much like an outsider. So I put my camera to my face and quietly shot what came to me, feeling like I didn’t belong and hoping that hiding behind the camera would make me invisible.

This image, two men drinking chai adjacent to the shrine, sat in my archives for well over a year before I re-discovered it – a witness to the fact that images don’t always say the same things, sometimes they resonate only after they’ve sat with us for a while. Sometimes our expectations of what images we “should” have captured get in the way of truly seeing the ones we did capture. This is that image for me.

And now, a couple trips to India later, this image more and more captures that time and place like none of my others. It captures for me the relationships, the gender roles, the way people take time to drink chai and talk and just “be.” It captures the agelessness of a place completely obsolesced by the modern world, and my longing to be in such a time and place where people slow down and move a little slower. It also pokes at my sense of injustice over the role of women in the majority world; reminds me of African women doing laundry or making meals while men sit lazily in the shade and talk the day away. Makes me uncomfortable, throws me emotionally off-kilter as I place myself on the floor beside those men and feel her presence there behind me. Makes me feel guilty, unable to enjoy my chai. Reminds me that while I’d left Canada thousands of miles to the west, I’d never really left my own culture. And maybe she had nothing at all to do with those men, though her proximity suggests otherwise. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but still even that is revealing. This photograph probably implies as much about me as it does them.

We stayed an hour or so, it felt like a day. We ate mutton on saffron rice at a first floor restaurant on the way out – one of the best meals of my life, I can still taste the mutton on my fingers and hear the din of the street below (should wash my hands and get my ears checked) Longing to return. Only 145 days.

Exif: EOS5D, ISO 800, 1/3200, f/2.0, 135/2.0 L lens. No idea why my ISO was so high. It’d been dark in the arcades and alleys, I was probably distracted.

Jodhpur, India. January 2006

Jodhpur is known as “the blue city” for the ubiquitous blue walls. The walls, predominantly washed with various shades of cobalt blue in the old city, lend Jodhpur a fairy-tale feel and the back alleys are a riot of blues, greens, and ambers. They are also home to an astonishing density of bicycles and scooters, which, it can only be assumed, multiply in the dark corners through mechanical mitosis. Overhead and always looming is the Mehrangarh fort, the hill fortress that both guards and dwarfs the town.

I shot this in the early hours of the morning. Dawn was only just beginning to break and the golden light of streetlamps was bathing everything in gold. It was a magical morning – my last for a couple days, as later this day I came down with a fever and went to bed whining and bitching about how much my throat hurt, etc., etc.

I had left the havelli without my tripod but found a handmade wooden ladder with four legs that nearly passed as stable and shot this little intersection of alleys until the dawn broke. Bicycles began to whiz past, and the day grew louder as the warrens and alley came to life.

It’s often about that time when I’m feeling about to give up and move on that something magical happens. Or when I am looking too hard. Almost any time other than the moments during which I am looking and waiting. This time a woman in red walked up the steps to the temple, wrapped her head and walked through the door.

This woman seemed to me a spectre, she moved softly and quietly, came from nowhere and vanished. The slow shutter speed necessitated by the low light gave me the effect I needed but didn’t have the time to be aware of.I shot about 6 frames hoping something captured the moment the way I’d seen it.

EXIF: Canon 5D, 17-40/4.0L at 1/5sec and f/9.0. ISO 800

Kathmandu, 2007.

This image is a result of pure dumb luck, as I am beginning to suspect the bulk of my images are. I was wandering the back alleys of Bhoda, just on the outskirts of Kathmandu, it was early morning, 6:30am, and the promised rainy season had just shown up. Truth be told I was in a funk – the kind that takes hold of me when I am in a place for an insanely short time and know that trying to feel-out the spirit of the place, let alone capture it in any meaningful way, is an insanely presumptuous task. It’s probably this very mindset that makes me manically search for the thing and which makes the thing itself so elusive. Trying too hard pushes the muse away.

Suddenly I looked up and saw this woman. Her fingers aren’t all there – there’re bits missing. You don’t have to look hard to see that life has been tough for her. She spent five minutes consumed by her devotion – lighting the butter lamps, swinging the incense, praying. She knew I was there, we acknowledged each other with a nod and a near-smile. I shot about 25 frames, my feet getting wet, no real sense of time. Mostly I just prayed she’d keep at her prayers long enough that my intrusion would result in an image that meant something, said something about her and her devotion.

You can’t plan these moments. They gobsmack you from your blindside. Slowly I am learning that creativity has its genesis in something, Someone, bigger than me – that it’s the process of seizing a small handful of convergent serendipitous elements the moment your muse taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey! Wake-up! Look at that.” And in the in-between times when there is nothing to look at and you feel like your muse is off screwing around when she should be hard at work, those are the times when it’s natural to fret and stew about the images you’re currently NOT creating. But natural or not, that inclination has a tendency to stand in front of you, looming, and preventing you from seeing the moments that ARE there. Or that WILL be there, any moment, if we have eyes to see them.

It’s taken me a while, and I re-learn this lesson with each assignment, but the more I embrace the times when nothing is happening, and the more I stop searching for what isn’t there – the more I start seeing what IS there. And that’s the only thing you can photograph.