Jean-Marc Giboux: Holy Men

Photo © Jean-Marc Giboux -All Rights Reserved

Jean-Marc Giboux started his photographic career in 1988 in Los Angeles where he was a correspondent for the Gamma-Liaison photo agency covering news, social issues and cultural trends for European publications.

In 1997, Giboux was awarded a grant from Rotary International to cover the progress of the worldwide polio eradication programs, traveling in India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia, Yemen, Mali, Niger, to name but a few. He also covered the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan for Doctors without Borders, and this was featured in an exhibition touring the USA and Europe from 2004 to 2006.

Currently residing in Chicago, Jean-Marc continues to collaborate with Doctors Without Borders, CARE, WHO, UNDP and the Rotary Foundation.

In an interview with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jean-Marc told the interviewer that funding was the most difficult part of his photography career. Outside of a major grant he got from Rotary to shoot the polio project and a couple of excursions with Doctors Without Borders, his projects are mostly self-funded.

Among his many humanitarian photo galleries, Jean-Marc has a gallery of portraits devoted to Hindu holy men...or sadhus. I assume that these were made while covering the Aardh Kumbh Mela in Hardiwar earlier this year. Have a look...they're made in sepia and in a square format.

How Many Arms Do I Need? And WTF?

I just read in WIRED's Gadget Lab that Zoom will launch a new Flip-like recorder that records beautiful audio for about $300. Stores expect it soon.

Zoom is the Japanese company that manufactures the various audio recorders that are popular with many multimedia producers, and which recently announced the affordable H1 Handy Recorder that I posted about here.

The plethora of useful (and others not so useful) products and gear aimed at multimedia producers, photographers, and videographers is incredible...but how do we carry and operate all this stuff?

And in the WTF? Department, here comes the Leica M9 Neiman Marcus Edition limited to a only 50 units. Engadget reports that it's "wrapped in a brown ostrich leather trim this time around, and it comes paired with a chrome-finished Summicron-M 35mm f2.0 ASPH lens", and costs $17,500.

A bargain. A trifle. A bagatelle.

I used to say (tongue-in-cheek like) that only orthodontists could afford the high end Leicas...but for this one, only hedge funds honchos need apply.

My Work: The Bali Trilogy

I'm glad to present Bali: The Trilogy; a three-part audio-slideshow (based on a chaptered SoundSlides platform), which consists of black & white documentaries of Balinese ceremonies.

The Melasti ceremony is an all important Balinese tradition of purifying temple deities in the waters of the ocean, the Ngaben is the Balinese tradition of cremating the dead, while the third is Tajen, the ancient tradition of cockfighting, technically illegal but still practiced on the island (and elsewhere in Indonesia).

This above link will not work on iPads (by the way, about 6-7% of my daily readers view this blog on their iPads, and I think this percentage is growing every day), however the following links will allow iPad owners to watch the individual audio-slideshows on their devices:

Bali: Melasti Purification Ceremony
Bali: Ngaben Cremation Ceremony
Bali: Tajen Cockfighting Event

A word about the choice of black & white;  I'm not sure if I'm entering a sort of black & white phase in my photography work, and this is its manifestation...or whether I've been influenced by the likes of John Stanmeyer and others...or whether it's a contrarian reaction to the surfeit of color I've witnessed when attending these ceremonies last month...or whether it's because the Balinese believe these ceremonies inherently involve spirits and dark forces...I don't know. It just felt better.

Let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy these audio-slideshows.