“A Bend in the River”
Laos 2007: A Laotian family tends their garden.
Sometimes I think that if it weren’t for farms and religion, there wouldn’t be anything for me to photograph.
Religion means churches and mosques and temples and often a certain type of dress, all of which make for colorful photographs. It means age-old customs with bowing, kneeling and processions. It means garlanded statues carried down narrow streets or bathed in the Mediterranean. It’s Theyyams in fantastic costume wreathed in smoke from burning incense. Or young monks, prostrate before the master, laboriously writing out holy scripture.
Farms or gardens show people doing something and usually they are so engrossed in their work that I am invisible. Their bodies are bent or stretched as they work. They are lifting and throwing. The wind might be blowing chaff from a winnowing basket. Maybe there are horses and wagons. It’s shepherds in the Atlas Mountains or maybe just a babushka leading her lone goat back from grazing on the steppes of Russia.
To me it is beautiful and I love to photograph it.