Journal:Photographers, reflections
It's a Saturday; my wife is in a mindfulness retreat, and my day is even less structured than usual. In the morning, my brother, an aviation buff, had sent me a link to an air museum in Sirvihisar, in central Turkey, joking that he'd love to see it some day. I looked up Sirvihisar in Wikipedia and noticed that one of the central personities who hailed from there was an Armenian poet, Moushegh Ishkhan, who once wrote that, for Armenians, whose diaspora lacked a territory,
"The Armenian language is the home and haven where the wanderer can own roof and wall and nourishment…"
I liked the idea of language being a cultural or communal space for those who lack a homeland, and wondered if this Armenian had fled from the same part of Turkey as the great Armenian-Canadian photographer, Yousuf Harsh. In the course of looking him up, I discovered an amazing London-based English language Arab journal, Al-Majallah, that I'd never seen before.
Al Majallah had a great article about the photographer Karsh, and another about an exhibition of photographs in London's Somerset House called "Snapshots of the Apocalypse", which featured the work of young photographers as well as of the late Brazillian Sebastião Salgado, of whom I was, typically, completely unaware.
I found several articles for further reading on Salgado. Maybe the best was in the New Yorker: Sebastião Salgado’s View of Humanity. To evade the New Yorker,'s paywall, it's best to turn off JavaScript (I keep Mullvad browser dedicated for this purpose of reading journals with paywalls but which can be accessed when Javascript is turned off and cookies are instantly forgotten).
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/sebastiao-salgados-view-of-humanity
…for a while, I studied and worked as an economist. I was a Marxist, then became a Maoist and afterwards a hippy. These movements gave me a communitarian vision of the planet, which inevitably led me to a human, social kind of photography. – Salgado
This, or another, article mentioned that Wim Wenders had made a film about Salgado called "Salt of the Earth", which I found on the Pirate Bay, downloaded and watched. It's an hour and 50 minutes long. A wonderful film - which takes us through Salgado's career in photographing the most horrific and sickening genocides.
After Rwanda… I no longer believed in anything - in any salvation for the human species. You couldn't survive such a thing. We didn't deserve to live. No one deserved to live.
But later in life, he made the radical transition to nature photography, capturing both intimate images of animals in their natural habitats and of spectacular wildernesses. This led to quite a different revelation:
The main thing to understand, I was as much a part of nature as a turtle or a tree, or a pebble.
Spending time with tribal societies from the Amazonas to the Arctic, he witnessed people who lived in a closer communion with the earth.
More than anything, it seems to have been the enormous reforestation project that he and his wife Leila initiated in Brazil that gave him real hope for a different eventuality for humankind and the planet.
I couldn't help but think of the concept of interbeing of all life, which Salgado seemed eventually to discover. And for our need to make a similar discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing
That's my unstructured day, so far.