Update: Tolpavakoothu

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

As a surprise photo-shoot for the photographers participating in my The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition/Workshop™, I arranged for a private Tolpavakoothu performance yesterday evening. Despite having seen and photographing shadow puppetry (an ancient storytelling art form) in Bali, I had never doe so in India, where it is especially indigenous to southern Kerala.

The photo shoot took most of the early evening when we photographed the preparations, whilst the performance itself (the frenetic action of some half dozen puppet masters was something to behold) took just 45 minutes.

Tolpavakoothu traces its origins to more than 2000 years, and the Thrissur area claims a particular style of this art.

The above image is of one of the Tolpavakoothu puppets, and was made with my iPhone4s.

The actual photographs of the action will be incorporated in a future photo essay.

Update: Kathakali Photo Shoot

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

Last night saw one of the most intense Kathakali performances I have ever witnessed (and I have seen quite a few of those in the last few years of my traveling to India). As followers and readers of this blog know, I am leading my The Oracles of Kerala Photo Expedition/Workshop™, and a two day stop in Cheruthuruthy was planned for a photo shoot involving the performers of this ancient art form, as well as attending a private almost 2-1/2 hours performance.

The performance and the earlier 3 hours make-up session took place at the Kalatharangini Kathakali School, and I, for one, sweated so much at the intensity of it all that I had to wipe my hands continuously to be able to shoot. I almost filled 3 full 16gb CF cards during that one photo shoot which started at 3:00 pm and ended just before 9:00 pm. On top of that, I probably videoed some 20 minutes of the performance with my Canon Mark II.

We will spend most of today in class to work on our individual multimedia photo essays, since we need to catch up with that element of the workshop. With all the photography we do, we really need to set time aside to work on these projects.

I am also preparing an evening surprise for the group members, which I think they will find very interesting.

The above image is of one of the Kathakali performers, and was made with my iPhone4s.

Note: This post's actual date is March 20 as it's written in India.

Vedic Gurukul

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

Another quick post as to the progress of The Oracles Of Kerala Photo Expedition-Workshop. Yesterday saw us at a Vedic school in Thrissur. Despite the long dive from Kumarakom to Thrissur, the Vedic school's beauty and ancient learning tradition were well worth the trouble.

I was surprised to learn that the restaurant manager at our hotel was also an authority on all Keralite festivals....we're trying to convince him to join our workshop!!!

Thirunakkara Utsavam Festival

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy- All Rights Reserved

 I barely have the time to post this today since the internet connection is somewhat iffy, but the day's photo shoot was at the Mahadeva temple for the Thirunakkara Utsavam festival. This is where I spotted this family of pilgrims. I'm uncertain of which sect they belong to, but I'll find out and edit this post shortly.

Note: These are members of a family on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala Temple, some 150 kilometers from Kochi, and they're adherents of Ayyappa.

Vietnam: Photo Expedition & Workshop

I am pleased to announce the Vietnam: North Of The 16th Parallel Photo Expedition/Workshop™ during which we are planning to explore the street life of bustling Ha Noi, the colorful villages and ethnic minority tribes around Sapa and the Sunday market of Bac Ha, the daily life in the ancient port city of Hoi An, the beauty of the Forbidden City in Hue and the fishing village of Lang Co, as well as spending a night on Halong Bay.

All the details, including a link to register interest in joining, for this exciting photographic expedition and workshop are on this website.

I will be assisted on this photo expedition by Maika Elan, a talented Vietnamese photographer and photojournalist.

I normally don't feature details of my photo expeditions on this blog until they are fully subscribed, but as I am flying to India today and returning home at the end of March, I thought it would be more practical to put it out there now.

I've already received a number of outright registrations and indications of interest, as a result of my newsletter.

Mark Coughlan: Maha Shivatri

Photo © Mark Coughlan-All Rights Reserved

Well, I'll be on my way to India in about 24 hours...and what better way to start the trip than by featuring Mark Coughlan's Maha Shivatri's photo gallery?!

A warning though...and perhaps in time of breakfast for my US-based readers. If you have no stomach for viewing ash-smeared sadhus with their testicles lifting piles of stones. look elsewhere. For instance, Mark's Portraits Of A Saint photo gallery, which is much tamer in comparison and consists of the sadhus' portraits. Not a testicle in sight there.

Maha Shivratri is a Hindu festival celebrated every year in reverence of Lord Shiva, and in common with many Hindu religious festivals, sees pilgrims and devotees bathe at sunrise, preferably in the Ganges, and carry pots of water to the temples to bathe the Shiva "linga",  and offer prayers to the sun, Vishnu and Shiva. Unmarried women pray for a husband like Shiva, considered to be the ideal husband.

Mark Coughlan is a documentary travel photographer specializing in global social issues and world events/festivals, who traveled diverse countries such as Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, China, Cambodia and Bolivia amongst others. He photographed some of the world’s greatest festivals and events including two Maha Kumbh Mela festivals (India), Maha Shivaratri (India & Nepal), and Nadam (Mongolia).

The Big Picture: Lathmar Holi

Photo © Adnan Abidi/Reuters-All Rights Reserved

I know....I've featured photographs of Lathmar Holi and of the main Holi festival a little too enthusiastically over the past few weeks, but the color is overpowering...and I'm in grey London on my way to India in a couple of days. I'm giving Holi a miss...landing in Delhi a day later, so I'm making up by posting really phenomenal photographs by Adnan Abidi, Manan Vatsyayana, and Kevin Frayer who've done a really great job of documenting this "pre-Holi Holi".

The Big Picture photo blog featured 22 of these photographs....each one better than the other.

Photo © Kevin Frayer-All Rights Reserved

Mary Calvert: Bhutan: The Art of Archery

Photo © Mary Calvert-All Rights Reserved

Bhutan's national sport is archery, and Mary Calvert documents the sport in her Bhutan: The Art of Archery photo gallery.

In Paro, I witnessed a couple of these archery contests, some impromptu and others more elaborate, in the valley where one could see the famous Tiger's Nest monastery. Apart from these contests being raucous, and during which I was told that opponents were fond of distracting each other by insulting each other, they are taken very seriously by participants and spectators.

There are two targets placed over 100 meters apart and teams shoot from one end of the field to the other. Each member of the team shoots two arrows per round. Traditional Bhutanese archery is a social event and competitions are organized between villages, towns, and amateur teams. 

Mary F. Calvert is an award winner photographer who worked as a staff photographer for eleven years on the award-winning staff of The Washington Times. She will be teaching Intermediate photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington D.C. In addition to being a guest faculty member of Momenta Workshops, the Western Kentucky University Mountain Workshops, the NPPA’s Flying Short Course, and the Eddie Adams Workshop, she has been a member of the faculty for the Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photographers Workshop in Ft. Meade for the last fourteen years.

She was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in International Photography for her project, “Lost Daughters: Sex Selection in India” in 2008,  and was awarded the White House News Photographers Association Project Grant to document sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Some of her clients include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, AOL, The New York Post, Inside Counsel Magazine, McClatchy-Tribune Photo Service, The International Herald Tribune,  Le Monde, Mother Jones, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Smithsonian 9th Annual Photography Contest

Photo © Kyaw Kyaw Winn-All Rights Reserved

I never participate in photography contests, but I know many of my readers do, or would like to. So here's one of the more popular contests featured by The Smithsonian magazine. 

Its editors have announced the 50 finalists in its 9th annual photo contest, which has five categories: Americana, The Natural World, People, Altered Images, and Travel.

In Focus, the photo blog of The Atlantic is featuring 25 large sized photographs from the final 50 finalists, which include some stunners from David Lazar, Nicholas Wiesnet, and Budi Prakasa. However, the one I liked the most was the photograph of soccer-playing Buddhist novices in Myanmar by Kyaw Kyaw Winn.

I ought to also highlight that The Smithsonian magazine’s 10th Annual Photo Contest begins March 1, 2012 and ends November 30, 2012.

Some may wonder why I am so empathetic about not participating in such contests. Here's why:

"By entering the contest, entrants grant the Smithsonian Institution a royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive license to display, distribute, reproduce and create derivative works of the entries, in whole or in part, in any media now existing or subsequently developed, for any educational, promotional, publicity, exhibition, archival, scholarly and all other standard Smithsonian purposes."

MSNBC: Lathmar Holi

Photo © Manan Vatsyayana / AFP - Getty Images

I featured quite a number of posts on Holi in the past weeks, and I'm not about to stop now especially as a number of photographer friends will soon be on their way to Mathura and Rajasthan to document the festivities.

MSNBC's PhotoBlog just featured a couple of large photos of Lathmar Holi, a festival which took place yesterday, a few of days before the actual Holi celebration. It takes place at Barsana near Mathura, where people flock to celebrate the revelries.

The Lathmar Holi festival begins with a ceremony at the Radha Rani temple. The legend has it that Radha and her friends decided to teach a lesson to Krishna for stealing their clothes at a bathing ghat, and in a sort of re-enactment ceremony, the male villagers in Barsana smear themselves with colors while the women attack them with wooden sticks in response to their efforts to put color on them.

More here with Kevin Frayer's photographs. On one of these photographs, the colored water was clearly splashed on his lens!

Alfonso Moral: Machine Man: 69th POYi

"Allah has said that a woman should behind 5 fences"

Alfonso Moral and Roser Corella were awarded POYi's First Place Award for Long Form Multimedia Story with their Machine Man, a documentary dealing with modernity and global development, with men (and women) as machines.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, men and women undertake hard physical tasks with machine precision and routine: they load their bodies with heavy materials; they manufacture bricks; they separate plastics and they drive rickshaws. They are the machine men, a mass of millions of people who become the driving force for the city.

There's a lot of powerful work by a variety of photographers on POYi 69th which has announced its winners. However, I decided to feature the work of Alfonso Moral (photographer ) and Roser Corella (editor) on this blog, not only because Machine Man is a very well done documentary, but because they're freelance.

I might take some flak for this, but the photographers and photojournalists backed by powerful newspapers, magazines and other media such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and the National Geographic getting awards have a considerable edge over others who don't enjoy this backing. It's therefore refreshing to see that POYi chose freelancers for this category.

Alfonso Moral is a Spanish photographer, who worked for a while with El Norte del Castiliano newspaper. He later moved to Syria and began focusing on the Middle East from where he covered Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq in addition to elections in Afganisthan and the Hezbollah movement in Southern Lebanon. Apart from winning a photojournalism grant for his work on the Palestinian refugees, his work was featured in El Pais and Newsweek amongst other publications. He is currently based in Barcelona.

Richard Van Lê: Cao Dai

I've recently found this updated short movie on Cao Dai by Richard Van Lê, which fits my current mindset, as I am thinking of a photo expedition-workshop to Vietnam in the near future.

Cao Dai (Cao Đài) is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, officially established in the city of Tay Ninh, in southern Vietnam, in 1926. Its first disciples claimed to have received direct communications from God, who gave them explicit instructions for establishing a new religion. It's a blend of elements from Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Animism.

Its saints' list is rather an eclectic one; with Buddha, Confucius, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, and Jesus.

More background on Cao Dai can be found here.

Richard Van Lêis a New York City-based photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia designer. He is the founder of 138 Media LLC.