Theyyams of Malabar: Victoria Olson

Photo ©Victoria Olson-All Rights Reserved.
A sand bagger on the shores of Mangalore, Karanataka
The Theyyam of Malabar Photo Expedition was joined by a number of talented full-time and part time photographers, whose primary objective was to photograph the Theyyam religious rituals as well as the Kathakali dance-drama, both indigenous to Kerala.

This is the fourth of a series of posts which showcase a sample of the work of the photographers who joined the expedition. The fourth post features four photographs by Victoria (Torie) Olson, a contributing editor at Wild Fibers Magazine, and author based in Vermont. Another peripatetic globetrotter, Torie traveled to Bhutan, Morocco, India and Thailand among other countries, to document indigenous traditions including textile arts and fiber farming.

Instead of Theyyam and Kathakali images, Torie provided these images made near the shores of Mangalore where, during our photo expedition, she spent time documenting a number of fishing communities. I would guess that based on the jewelry, these women are from Gujarat. She uses a Nikon D90 with a 18-200 lens.

Photo ©Victoria Olson-All Rights Reserved.
Hauling the daily catch on the shores of Mangalore, Karanataka
Photo ©Victoria Olson-All Rights Reserved.
A worker on the shores of Mangalore, Karanataka
Photo ©Victoria Olson-All Rights Reserved.
Repairing fishing nets on the shores of Mangalore, Karanataka

William Dalrymple: Nine Lives

By pure chance I landed on the website of one of my favorite authors, William Dalrymple, whose new book – Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India – will be published by Bloomsbury in October.

I've copied this excerpt of the accompanying blurb from the Amazon UK website:

"Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerizing, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid change. Nine Lives is a distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, taking you deep into worlds that you would never have imagined even existed."

This promises to be a cracker of a book, and if you want to get a taste for its contents, you can read this article on the devadasis in the New Yorker magazine.

These are the kind of books that ought to be read by all established and aspiring travel-documentary photographers, since they provide ideas for photo-documentary projects, and intellectual/historical texture to successfully develop such projects.

Just before traveling last month to India, I recently re-read parts of Dalrymple's City of Djinns; parts dealing with the Sufi dargahs in Delhi, and this enhanced my appreciation of these sites while I visited them.

2009 Sony World Photography Awards

© Wojciech Grzedzinski (Courtesy Sony World Photography Awards 2009)
The Independent featured winners of the 2009 Sony World Photography Awards as revealed yesterday. Each of the photographers on the list, along with the runners-up in the professional categories, will be exhibited at the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, on Thursday 16 April.

Of the 12 professional category winners, one photographer will be the recipient of the L’Iris D'Or, the Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year. On the night they will be awarded $25,000. The winning amateur photographer, selected from the eight category finalists, will receive a $5,000 cash prize.

Wojciech Grzedzinski of Poland won the award for Professional Photojournalism and Documentary - Current Affairs, with his photograph of a Catholic priest blessing a soldier in full combat gear. Since time immemorial, religion has been used to absolve the sins of war...and why not, since most religions were, and are, the cause for violent conflict.