Brent Stirton: Omo Valley/Bull Jumping

© Brent Stirton/Courtesy Discovery Channel
I've featured Brent Stirton's fabulous work on the Omo Valley a few months ago, and now bring him back with a Quicktime movie of the bull-jumping ceremony (click the small arrow above to start it).

The bull-jumping ceremony is an important ritual performed by some of the tribes of the Omo Valley region of southern Ethiopia, and is considered a sort of a rite of passage in a tribal man’s life. Bull jumping is a prerequisite for a man to take a wife and have children, and it involves him undergoing a number of rituals before leaping onto and running over the backs of cattle.

I witnessed the bull-jumping ceremony not far from Turmi, a village in the Omo Valley, and was taken aback (an understatement) by a preceding ritual involving the women of the Hamar tribe tribe being whipped by the men in their families.

Aditya Kapoor: Goa

Photograph © Aditya Kapoor-All Rights Reserved
Aditya Kapoor tells us in his biography that his two great passions are travel and photography, and that living in a heritage country such as India provided him a wealth of "diverse communities, architectural marvels, nature and different traditions waiting to be explored".

His photography has been published in various publications such as Tehelka magazine, Hindustan Times, Outlook, Indian Express, India Today and Mail Today, and he is actively involved with NGO’s such as Ithihaas, The National Association for the Blind, Tamana School and SECA.

Aditya's website has many galleries, and I chose his work on Goa to show here. I'm a fan of much larger photographs on photographers' websites, but unfortunately bandwidth realities have to be taken into account. I'm always glad to be able to show the work of emerging and promising photographers, and Aditya is one of them.