Out of Eden Walk: 30 Million Footsteps

A few posts ago I suggested there were no more explorers in the mold of Richard Francis Burton.

I was wrong.

An incredible exploration trek is being planned by Paul Salopek, a writer for the Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, who will be walking the journey taken by early man tens of thousands of years ago.

The walk, Out of Eden, will take 30 million footsteps, over 21, 000 miles over 7 years to complete. It will start in Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, and will cross the Red Sea into the Middle East, cross China, into Siberia, cross the Bering Strait into Alaska and then walk all the way down the western coasts of North and South America.

Graphic courtesy The Observer

Salopek will be taking a micro-light laptop, video and audio recording tools, since he intends to record his journey; including landscapes and voices and faces of the people he meets on the walk. He will also be taking a satellite phone through which he will be uploading his journal's recordings to his his website.

He tells The Guardian newspaper that "We will be creating a family portrait of humanity for the next seven years."

That promises to be one damn exciting journey for all of us.

Jan Schlegel: Pain & Beauty Redux

Photo © Jan C. Schlegel-All Rights Reserved

Oh, followers and readers of The Travel Photographer blog will like this!

Ethnophotography, traditional process, photographs made with a 4x5 field camera (Ebony SV45 Ti) on Kodak Tmax 400, and negatives developed in Kodak D76 Developer 1+1 dilution...then selenium toned. What's not to like?

"None of the people photographed wear special make-up or were specially dressed before the photos were taken. They were all captured in their own habitat — at the market, in the village square, or simply on the roadside." Jan Schlegel

Jan C. Schlegel is a German photographer, whose ethno-photographic work is in the tradition of Phil Borges.  In 1998, he began traveling throughout Asia and Africa with the objective of photographing diverse people groups and tribes, and has so far traveled to 61 countries and is still in pursuit of the beauty and diversity of the nations.

The quality of these photographs are just remarkable. His website claims that he succeeds in not only creating artistic photographs, but in documenting the uniqueness of his subjects...the people who posed for him. Absolutely.

And I have a lot of respect for a photographer who doesn't follow the fad of making demeaning portraits of Ethiopian tribal people wearing ridiculous ornaments. Speaking of ornaments, take a look at the magnificent jewelry of the Himba women...and don't miss the beautiful eyes of the Kalash women.

I had posted Jan's work some years ago here, but it seems he changed his website, and added much more work.

Captain Tristram Speedy: Travel Photography At Bonhams

Why would I mention Bonhams, an auction house, on The Travel Photographer's blog?

Well, it's because Bonhams is holding an auction of a rare photographic album of 180 Ethiopian images by Julia Margaret Cameron, Felice Beato and others. These images include a number of self portraits of Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy(1836-1910), a well-known English explorer and adventurer during the Victorian era, who was also known by his Amharic name 'Báshá Félíka'.

He was a fascinating character who was an Indiana Jones of his time, with a long association with India, Ethiopia and Sudan.

Born in Meerut (India), Captain Speedy was a red-haired bearded man 6'5" tall, who learned to speak Amharic, adopted Ethiopian native dress, and was photographed by Cameron in various guises such as a Bedouin chief, a Nubian chief, a Nubian warrior and much more. He was the inspiration for a number of popular books.

I am enormously interested in news like that because it merges history, Africa, Asia, adventurism, exploration and photography. Despite my abhorrence of colonialism, I consider men such as Richard Francis Burton and now, Tristram, as quintessential eccentric explorers, as orientalists and ethnologists, and as remarkable linguists with an extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures.

They just don't make men that way anymore.

For those who don't know Julia Margaret Cameron: she was a British photographer born in Calcutta, known for her portraits of celebrities of the time. Her photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875), and got her first camera when she was 48 as a gift from her daughter.

As for Felice Beato (1832-1909), he was an Italian–British photographer, and one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War.

Nicolas Lotsos: The Masai Typology

Photo © Nicolas Lotsos-All Rights Reserved

"Photography is my motive for travel."

The Masai Typology is one of the many gorgeous photo galleries of Africa by photographer Nicolas Lotsos. I'm not much of an African wildlife aficionado, but his fine art galleries of photographs of the handsome Masai, of Zanzibar, or of the African slums and townships are lovely exemplars of monochromatic imagery.

Nicolas Lotsos is  a fine art photographer (and in my view, a travel photographer as well) and a basketball agent. He co-runs a sports agency representing some of the top sports figures in Europe. He has been a photographer since he was 16 years old, and specializes in photographs of wild life and nature.

He also won an impressive number of awards, to include Gold Winner at the 2012 Grand Prix de la Photographie, Outstanding Achievement at the Spider Award 2012, the 2012 Veolia Wildlife Photographer Award, including two awards by the Travel Photographer Of The Year (TPOTY), amongst others.

A Nilotic group in East Africa, next to the Indian Ocean, the Masai society is patriarchal, and elder men decide most major matters for each group. A full body of oral law covers many aspects of behaviour. The Masai are monotheistic, worshipping a single deity.

Dan Kitwood: Benin Voodoo

Photo Dan Kitwood/Getty Images-Courtesy The Guardian

Can anything dispel the auguries of a Friday 13th better than a Benin Voodoo festival?

Being fascinated by such religious festivals and rituals (the more obscure the better), I was glad to have seen Dan Kitwood's gallery of a Benin Voodoo festival in The Guardian, which also led me to his website/blog on which he lays out further captivating photographs (with better resolution) of Voodoo which also has a slideshow at the bottom of the post.

As seen in the above photograph, the costumes are incredibly colorful...perhaps rivaling the Bhutanese dancers at tsechus in their elaborateness and intricacy of their embroidered designs .

In the tiny West African nation of Benin, Voodoo is and remains the state religion. Incredibly, voodoo has officially been a national religion of Benin since 1996, where more than 60% of the people are said to follow its traditions. Slaves from this corner of Africa brought the religion to the New World, most notably to Haiti.

And while Christianity and Islam in Benin are also practiced, voodoo still influences them. In the voodoo tradition, there's a supreme god, Mahu, and a number of smaller gods or spirits, with whom humans can interact.

Dan Kitwood is a UK photojournalist who, after completing a degree in Fine Art, traveled around South East Asia, Australasia and South America, which triggered a passion for photography. After two years working for the South West News he joined Getty Images in London.

Agata Pietron: War Songs (Part 1)

Here's the powerful, technically well-made and intelligent multimedia work by the talented Agata Pietron.  It's about teenagers who live in one of the most dangerous places in the world: in the two Kivus in East Democratic Republic of Congo, where war lasted for two decades. These young men and women experienced the influx of Rwandan refugees into their homeland of South and North Kivu, which caused political instability, genocide and eventually civil war.

These young people want to rebuild their lives by embracing hip-hop, rap and R&B as musicians, and take American monikers such as  Dangerous, Young Boys, B2K, Kashmal, Lille Cent, Peace Life, Victory etc. They speak in French, but the audio slideshow is subtitled in English. Excellent pacing, top notch audio...enviable resolution.

Agata Pietron is an independent photographer and journalist, currently based in Warsaw. She graduated from Cultural Studies at University of Warsaw, studied at European Academy of Photography and Academy of Film and Television. Now she works mainly on social projects. Her works has been exhibited in Poland and abroad. Her clients (among others) are: Orange, Unicef, RR Donnelley, Sotis, Lego, Natura, Lyreco, Fundacja Pomocy Dzieciom Niepełnosprawnym, Fundacja Synapsis.

She's also an alum of the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop...which she attended a number of times; last of which was in Buenos Aires. She worked in the DRC; covering many social issues that put her safety at risk on more than one occasion.

A real pro. What else can I say?