THE SILK ROAD II: BASHFUL IN BUKHARA

BASHFUL IN BUKHARA

BUKHARA (UZBEKISTAN) USSR 1984 

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY 

ON FARAWAY STREETS 

You have been introduced to one of the monuments of the Silk Road city of Bukhara; now meet a few of its people. 

"HERE BE GIANTS" 

MAGIC WATERS IN THE DESERT: LIMA, PERU

MAGIC WATERS IN THE DESERT

TROUBLES IN THE AMAZON

LIMA, PERU 

For an almost-summer weekend, something light from an almost-summer evening in Lima, Peru. 

To wit, a light (and music) and water show from the Circuito Magico del Agua -- the "Magic Water Circuit" -- in a city in the desert. 

Something like a third of the twenty-seven-million population of Peru is said to live in its capital, Lima, tucked between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains. 

Meanwhile, out in Amazonian Peru, there has been since April an on-going protest over indigenous rights and mineral rights. Three weeks ago the government imposed a sixty-day local state of emergency. 

President Alan Garcia, who proudly hosted the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit last November, is keen to promote development. He is quoted as having said that "The riches of Peru belong to all Peruvians," and the benefits should not go only to the "small group of people who live there." 

Back in the capital yesterday (May 29), Prime Minister Yehude Simon threatened to resign. 

The Magic Water Circuit, located in the Reserve Park in the Santa Beatriz district of Lima, is open Wednesday through Sunday from 4 p.m. It perhaps becomes most magical as night falls. 

More on the crisis, which has turned deadly, here (check under June 6, 2009).

More "PERU SCENES" 

JFK ON THE GINZA

"JOHN F. KENNEDY" 

ON THE GINZA 

AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ICON ... 

IN JAPAN 

IN HONOR OF JFK, BORN ON THIS DATE 

IN 1917, IN BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

PRESIDENT, 

JANUARY 20, 1961-NOVEMBER 22, 1963 

In 1981, en route to China for my first visit, I had a chance to dash downtown to Tokyo for an hour-and-a-half, and grabbed it. 

I was back in the country where I lived for a year as a child, in the town of Sasebo, and where, at age eight, I had taken my first photographs. 

And what did I see but an image of our slain president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a store front window on the Ginza – being used to sell glasses. 

Such is the power of icons and the mystery of iconography, and of cross-cultural exchanges.  

THE SILK ROAD I: NADIR DIVAN BEG MADRASA, BUKHARA

NADIR DIVAN BEG MADRASA 

Today, something from the world of Islam – something beautiful, and something a bit unusual. Shown above is a close-up of the pishtaq (a "portal projecting from the facade of a building") of the Nadir Divan Beg Madrasa in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. 

Bukhara is a Silk Road city, Persian-influenced, over two millennia old.   The UNESCO World Heritage Committee calls it "the most complete example of a medieval city in Central Asia." It was once "the largest center for Muslim theology in the Near East";  a madrasa (madrasah, medresseh) is a school, a school for the study of Islamic religion and thought. 

The Nadir Divan Beg Madrasa, built in 1622, was, the story goes, originally meant to be a caravanserai. This is supposed to somewhat soften the violation of the Islamic prohibition against the depiction of living creatures:  better on an inn for trading caravans than on a religious institution. 

But then, phoenixes (above) are only mythical, no?  And the human (man?) in the sun? As to the two white deer (one shown above), well, perhaps they may be called "stylized." 

When I visited Bukhara in 1984 and photographed the madrasa, Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan has been independent since the end of 1991. 

OTHER WEDDINGS II: QINGDAO, CHINA

TO THE BELL TOWER 

OTHER WEDDINGS II 

QINGDAO, CHINA

Red is the traditional color for brides in China. But though the young woman in this couple is dressed in white, in a "Western" gown, tradition has not been altogether neglected. Observe the touches of red. 

Here, in 1994, a video camera (behind the wedding couple) is also coming up the stairs to the heights of the Bell Tower. 

OTHER WEDDINGS I

AT LENIN'S FEET 

OTHER WEDDINGS I 

BACK IN THE USSR 

As June is almost here, and with it the wedding season in the USA, two weddings from other countries, other cultures: In today's photograph a newly married couple in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk comes in 1984 to be photographed at the foot of the Lenin statue in the heart of town. 

FULL MILITARY HONORS

HE'S NOT HEAVY...

FULL MILITARY HONORS

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

IN HONOR OF MEMORIAL DAY

MET ON A MOUNTAIN PASS: NEAR KUNMING, CHINA

MET ON A MOUNTAIN PASS

NEAR KUNMING, CHINA

DRESSING UP AS SOLDIERS 

FROM OTHER ERAS (1994)

"HERE BE GIANTS"

A RAINY DAY IN THE PROVINCES: ROSTOV-ON-THE-DON

A RAINY DAY IN THE PROVINCES

ON THE EVE OF PERESTROIKA

LENIN BILLBOARD & CAR

ROSTOV-ON-THE-DON (RUSSIA), USSR

THINKING AGAIN ABOUT COMMUNISM, III

The USSR on the Eve of Perestroika: "To Us the Most Precious Is the Preservation of Peace" -- V.I. Lenin," the slogan on the billboard says. The year is 1984.

Lenin had died in 1924. (More in HERE BE GIANTS)

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

SHIFT CHANGE 

Katowice Coal Mine, Poland, 1981 

THE FALL OF COMMUNISM II

Speaking of the fall (or not) of communism ("All Rise," May 21, 2009), we are in the primetime of the twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. 

The year 1989 saw the second "Springtime of Nations." In astonishment, and uncertainty, the outside world, and even the political actors within the various members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, watched as events unfolded and limits were pushed. 

Now, twenty years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, serves as a stand-in for all the regime changes that year. And the violent climax of the downfall of all the Soviet-bloc regimes in Eastern Europe came on Christmas Day, in Romania, when the just-deposed former leader Nicolae Ceausescu -- and his wife -- were executed by firing squad. 

But the Polish story should not be overlooked.  Timothy Garton-Ash believes "to this day that the Round Table - that is to say, the negotiated revolution - was a particularly Polish discovery, and is in a way Poland’s gift from 1989 to the world." 

The backstory includes the founding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980, and its rise and rise until it was crushed in December 1981. When I took photographs all over Poland in the summer of 1981 (including the coal miners in Katowice, above), it was obvious how entrenched Solidarity was in the workplaces, and in society more generally.  At its height, there were said to be ten million members, out of a population of thirty-some million. 

  

That summer, and into the fall, there was nervous speculation as to whether the Soviet Union would invade; it was the era of Leonid Brezhnev and the Brezhnev Doctrine ('what we have, we hold'). But in the end, on December 13, 1981, Poland's own leaders imposed martial law.  Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders 

were thrown in jail. 

Solidarity came back to life again after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and seemed to embrace the possibilities of reform in other communist countries besides his own.  Still, as Garton-Ash testifies, "You have to remember that nobody knew what would happen next and nobody knew what the Soviet Union would accept." 

ALL RISE: OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM

ALL RISE

The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
THE FALL? WAS WHEN EXACTLY?

Today, in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama made a rather strange statement for someone who is supposed to be so bright, and who is in charge of the national security apparatus of the U.S. 

Here is the wind-up: "Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world." 

Okay. Then: Enemy soldiers… strong alliances …

Then, "It's the reason why we've been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty." 

"…outlast the iron curtain of communism.…"

Oh, yes? The People's Republic of China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, has fallen? (and the regimes in Cuba, and North Korea, and Vietnam…?) 

Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan came back from his first trip to what he had been pleased to call "Red China" and spoke of the "so-called Communist China." This in 1984. 

In the fall of 2007, at the time of the most recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, I showed an American in Beijing a copy of the photograph above, taken at the previous Congress, the 16th (November 2002). He looked at the giant hammer and sickle and said, Oh, Russia.

Whatever one may think of what has happened since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communists have not ruled there since December 1991, while in China they go on and on. So far. 

BUDDY GUY SINGS THE BLUES

BUDDY GUY 
HIGHLIGHTS 

A concert photograph from back when, in honor of blues legend Buddy Guy's role in Bertrand Tavernier's film, In The Electric Mist, made from the novel, In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, by Grand Master James Lee Burke. 

The book and the movie are set in Louisiana, where Buddy Guy was born, and the past is, Burke and Tavernier tell us, still very much with us.