“Kolkata: Art, Spirit, 2012” concludes my four part photo-essay on my brief visit to Kolkata. My reason for being there was my Dad. Dad was a farm kid from deep in the country of southeast Georgia who never finished the 7th grade. In WW II he was in the US Army Air Corps, stationed in the Bengal area of Bangladesh and India (all of it India then), and it’s always seemed to me it would have been a huge culture shock for him. I regret he passed before I was curious enough to ask him about his feelings, details of his experience. I wanted, in some small way, to try to get a feel for what he might have seen, even all these years later. During my visit, and now reviewing the images, it feels like a creative thread runs through every aspect of life there. Something being practical, utilitarian, doesn’t mean it can’t also be pretty or interesting visually, and the craftsmanship is sometimes spectacular. The gallery runs through a series, from art found on the street to elaborate spiritual palaces. In September/October Kolkata celebrates the Durga Puja festival and for months beforehand extravagant straw and clay sculptures and altars are created to only be walked into a river and left to dissolve at the end. In the countryside, ancient temples are covered with small tiles of bas-relief designs and characters, or groupings, each character uniquely individual.

If you want to know the feel of a place, you need to be on foot, on the street, off the beaten tourist path, and not part of a herd. It is not enough to see something of it through a window. You have to be where you can hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it. Step in it. To capture detail and intimacy in narrative photographs, I like to use a wide angle lens and step into the scene. This gallery is a series of photographs from street level that tell some stories of the “feel” I got for Kolkata and countryside.

This gallery explores a variety of energetic commercial activities: from street vendors to a wholesale flower market; an enormous indoor wholesale vegetable market where large bales of produce are dropped off outside and groups of men muscle the bale up and onto their heads to walk it into the market; and a large-scale, non-electric commercial laundry.

Ten years of neighbors decorating the squares for the holidays, missing two years.

Barbara and I wanted to do a trip with some physically active components, and signed up for a self-guided multi-day bicycle ride from Passau to Vienna. I was apprehensive about how little riding we do at home and could we handle this distance–a question about both endurance and our buns’ ability to sit on a bike seat all day for several days. It’s awkward, at a minimum, to get in the middle of something and have to bail. Turned out to be easy, especially with E-bikes, and a great navigation program, furnished by the travel company. Another concern was that I had stopped almost immediately at the beginning to make photographs of something interesting. There was something interesting, of course, the whole way, cycling on great bike paths, well-marked, along the Danube, and through fields and farmland, and picturesque villages and towns. It was all so pretty; our daily distance was short enough to amble along and enjoy the ride, but it was necessary for me to exert much discipline in not stopping every five minutes to shoot. We would never have made it to the next hotel before dark.

Athens, GA, 1974 "DON'T LOOK ETHEL!" from "The Streak" by Ray Stevens It was beautiful early springtime weather at the end of Winter Quarter at the University of Georgia. A colleague from The Red and Black, the daily student newspaper, was at my apartment that Monday evening when we heard there was a disturbance outside the high rise dorms along Baxter Avenue, so we hurried over. (No cell phones then, or 24/7 news coverage; not even a local TV station in Athens, so I don't know how we heard.) Streaking had been happening around the country and a couple of people had dropped trou and drew a small crowd. Athens police overreacted by firing tear gas into the crowd drawing more students out, in a less than friendly mood. This happened the first of the week, for a couple of nights, but calmer heads prevailed and the students eventually even cleaned up the mess. It was the beginning of an eventful week.

Hot air balloon ride overlooking the Valley of the Kings.

We were a workshop group visiting the Black and White Deserts, about 200 miles southwest of Cairo. As part of the itinerary, an arrangement was made with some local camel owners to model for the group, but they (the camels and men) are real, and the desert is real. This could have happened. The deserts were unique, with the basalt caps on the large dunes in the Black Desert, and the chalk and limestone whiteness along with the strangely eroded formations in the White. We wrapped up the day under the Milky Way, eating in a Bedouin camp.

October, 2022--Claxton, about an hour’s drive west of Savannah, is where my antecedent family has lived since around the time of the Revolutionary War. A couple of years ago I drove there for a cousin’s funeral. Some other cousins also attended the service, taking time to clean up a family plot in the Hagan cemetery. Although I think I was the only one there senior enough to remember attending the old family reunions that happened the first (or second?) Sunday of every June, we got to talking about that long gone event. We (Mom, Dad, my sister, and I) would drive up there on the Sunday morning, maybe directly from church, to participate in a potluck meal. The location was always “Uncle Herschel’s” to me; the residents at the old house were my father’s uncle and his wife. We’d drive down a dirt road until we came to the house, alongside the road, as the road continued on to agricultural fields. Large planks would be set up on sawhorses in front of the house and the “table” might have been 75 feet long or more, loaded, groaning, with food in wide varieties of fried chicken and potato salad, lots of overcooked vegetables, and every kind of pie and cake you can imagine. (I was young and small then, so my estimates of size may be questionable, but not the sense of abundance.) A local attendee at the funeral told us Uncle Herschel’s house was still there, and how to find it. Leading a cousin caravan, I drove down the old dirt road and at some point, knew we had gone too far, without seeing the house. Backtracking, we found it mostly hidden by overgrowth. Pushing my way through the brush, I wandered through the forgotten home. The “Old Home Place” was an unpainted clapboard building with a deep front porch that extended across the entire front of the house. Inside was a central hallway with two rooms off either side, extending out the backdoor with an elevated walkway to a cooking room separated from the main house, to keep the heat and fire away from the living quarters. That walkway almost certainly led to the outhouses as well. Somewhere along the way someone had added indoor plumbing—a kitchen and bathroom. And then somewhere along the way the last residents left, discarding some of the detritus we all accumulate. I’ve included a copy of an old photograph showing the house in the background, with my dad’s generation massed where the food table was normally laid. Dad is the cool cat seated 6th from the left, with the plaid shirt (in a sea of starched white) and two-toned shoes. His grandparents Thomas Alfred Durrence (1831-1893) and Elizabeth Grice Durrence (1838-1922) owned the farm leading up to the Civil War, owned slaves, went through the war and Reconstruction; my Great Grandmother Elizabeth would have lived through WW I, and my dad would have been 5 years old the year she died; he would have known her. “Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' Into the future….” Steve Miller Band

The last night of my first trip out of the US, in 1986, we stopped at a beach area along the northern Italian coast, making our way from Pisa to Milan.

The Grand Finale of Streak Week: 1543 people took off all their clothes and ran from south campus to north campus. Earlier in the week students at the University of South Carolina had set a record for the largest group streak at 300. Not to be outdone by Gamecocks, word spread across campus that the Dawgs would attempt to break that record. After the confrontations with Athens' finest earlier in the week, the administration quietly put out the word that any events au natural should be confined to school property. So, on a beautiful, balmy Thursday evening, 1543 people set a record that still stands. We know the number because campus security stationed officers at every entrance to the finish area and counted them as they came in. Earlier the same day another unique moment came when five guys sky-streaked, jumping out of an airplane wearing nothing but parachutes, and landed on the intramural fields.

Continuing Streak Week from my last post, passions ran high as culture wars were in full force. Lester Maddox, streaked by several men while speaking, was on campus campaigning for the Democratic nomination in the Georgia gubernatorial election, running against George Busbee. William Shockley, who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics, was also at UGA to debate his theory that non-White peoples were genetically inferior to Whites. In an early example of what is now called cancelling, he was chased from the auditorium and campus and no debate happened. To be clear, I find any notion of racial superiority abhorrent, but I also believe preventing a disagreeable opinion from being debated is wrong. The only way to defeat an argument is to offer a better argument. The Free Speech clause of the First Amendment must protect even the most vile and offensive speech, or it is an empty promise. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are for children.