China may be changing but not for the better in Tibet. This video shows a Tibetan nun burning herself alive in protest.
Author Archive for Jonesxxx Jonesxxx
04
Feb
12
Hajj at The British Museum
Tapestry
I visited the Hajj exhibition at the British Museum today. The queue to buy the ticket looked worse than it was. The queue to enter the exhibition wasn’t so bad but I was a bit frustrated that everyone thought that they needed to queue for every exhibit. I skipped a few at the front and browsed around. A good exhibition but a lot of it was writing and photographs. They told the history and the story of the Hajj which is interesting but I like to see some exhibits and there were a reasonable number of these. Mostly tapestries but also some clothes worn during Hajj and a lot of old books. The tapestries were pretty amazing and many featured Arabic writing. It would have been nice to have some translations of this. The numbers of people made it difficult to get a good look at the explanatory text for each item but I guess I’m a bit impatient with this sort of thing. I like to hop from one thing to another and I hate queuing.
In fact queueing seemed to be a central theme to this exhibition in more ways than one. One of the key features of the Hajj is that each pilgrim walks 7 times around a large black stone cube known as the Kaaba at the Masjid al-Haram. Thousands of pilgrims attend and many photos showed the swirling people. As a keen photographer, these images piqued my interest. Many were shot at night, apparently under floodlights, and showed thousands of people stationary amongst a blur of others. I speculate that a fairly unique part of this ritual is that the people are either in motion, walking in the same direction, or they are absolutely still in meditation or prayer and that this is a great photographic opportunity.
The part or the exhibition that I liked best was the modern Islamic art which would not have looked out of place in Tate Modern. A good exhibition but I think the lesson is to rent one of those talking boxes which will explain stuff as you wander around.
The Hajj exhibition is open now at The British Museum on Great Russell Street in London and runs to the 15th April 2012. Entrance to the museum is free though they request a donation of £5. The Hajj exhibition tickets are £12. The nearest tube stations is Tottenham Court Road12.
Roses
01
Feb
12
Obituary: Ronald Searle
Good grief, the great and the good are dropping like flies. Last week I heard that the cartoonist Ronald Searle had clocked out in December age 91. I can’t write obits for all these people but thankfully this is not necessary as The Economist published a fantastic one last week. The audio edition is even better.
men drinking at a bar in Berlin
24
Jan
12
State of Mind
Have been creating videos for a musician friend who goes by the named of Zcienze.
Balham Lodge
Last Thursday evening I was in Tooting and ate in the Mirch Masala which had been recommended to me by a friend. The interior is basic but the food is simple and good with fast and polite service. The only thing I’d criticise is the modern obsession with noise but this is not unique to the Mirch. Modern bars and restaurants seem to deliberately omit noise damping furnishings and consequently one is forced to endure a cacophony of other people’s conversation rebounding off the walls and ceiling. Mirch Masala was by no means the worst, that award might easily go to somewhere like All-Bar-1. Friday I spent in Balham which seems more trendy and the area around the corner of Balham High Road and Bedford Hill seem, to me, to be another restaurant ghetto like many that have sprung up all over London. I browsed around the repetitious identi-kit restaurants and finally opted for the Seascape Fish Bar which is a traditional Fish and Chip shop where I was served immediately and was sitting down and eating within minutes.
I spent Friday night in the Balham Lodge, a beautiful old London house on the corner of Bedford Hill and Hillbury Road, within easy walking distance of both Tooting Bec Common and Balham Underground station. Both the exterior and interior of this hotel are very well maintained and beautifully decorated. My room was a little small and oddly shaped but very clean and functional with TV and wifi.
- Tooting Bec Common
On Saturday morning I walked a while on the common, the benches sparkling in crystal frost and a mist rising from the playing field. With the sun in my eyes I watched the people walking their dogs and a hoard of people playing football. And the joggers, Ah the joggers. Physical exercise for it’s own sake. Sedentary office workers unwilling to walk to work lest they rumple their suits forced to run around in their underclothes to get their pulses racing. In previous centuries one strolled around parks and along river banks. But now, now one doges the fucking joggers. If they want to run why don’t they fuck off and live in the country?
Obsession with sport has two advantages as far as society is concerned. First it keeps us fit so we can become more productive workers and second the endless discussion of the inanity of the scoring and point systems ensures that our brains are kept in an infinite loop of trivia and subsequently we are rendered too stupid to question anything.
“Play football on Sunday?” – “NO! FUCK OFF! I was too busy laying in bed thinking of ways to undermine the foundations of the corporate-military complex…..or something.”
Yachts
Photography
travel photography – Objectifying the subject
Tags: Andaman Islands, Art, cameras, developing world, flickr, human safaris, India, Jarawa, Jarawa people, photographer, photography, The Guardian, The Long Way Home, Tourism, tourists, Travel, Uganda
The Long Way Home
Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
Vietnamese Girls