"Otherness" a book of Asia

(Excerpt from hand made book)

As a traveler the awareness of being separate is acute. At once you are the “other” while being seduced by the exotic quality of life beyond your ordinary experience. “Otherness” (from an existentialist understanding) recognizes the impossibility of ever being able to fully comprehend that which is beyond oneself. As a traveler this is particularly the case.

Armed with expensive imaging technology we have the power to engage and record our time abroad. What is produced is inherently problematic. The images technology affords end up in family albums or posted on facebook. The pictures themselves depict “us” grotesquely out of place collaged in front of great monuments making victory signs with friends or as evidence of being to places on the must see list.

The following is further evidence of that urge to record and create. It sits on a continuum between travel-log and an art book. The images seek to transcend a mere capitulation of a travel slideshow. Yet, to be art, or photographs purporting to be art, pictures must advance concepts from ones own cultural and social experience. Being self conscious of the critique of what constitutes “art,” but as a traveler awed by the exotic quality of the continent what follows is a compromise between these two positions.

The pictures were organized in large part by the motive of recording how people work, because work is the essence of lived experience. However, it is watching from the perspective of fascination for processes that are alienated from “western” practices. Most of the pictures were taken in Nepal and Northern India, but images from the transit cities of Calcutta and Mumbai are also included. The organization is thematic. They begin in the north, in the Himalayas, showing porters, migrants, children walking to school, agriculture, and the incredible effort to cut roads through those mountains. In some of the pictures the environment seems to engulf the human efforts, yet also irreparably the footprint of activity is transforming the natural landscape.

The images move south and show existence in the city. Throughout the role women play in the working environment is evident. These urban images include a few frames of the slums and are juxtaposed with a form of activity hidden in the west, though wonderfully conspicuous in the east, worship.

Within a tradition of working landscape photographs of Salgado, Gursky or Burtynsky these pictures show people working enclosed within a landscape. We see people tending animals along a hillside and the rivers in India and Nepal during the dry season become a hive of enterprise as individuals set up small work sights and sift and scourer through the sand producing bags a cement that they sell. Finally an enormous effort has been made to cut roads into vast regions of the Himalayas. These roads are replacing footpaths. Soon jeeps will ply the roads carrying the goods once served by porters and pack animals. Development will make thousands of workers obsolete and yet will give these communities unheard of access to the outside world. For now, the roads are shorn from the rocks by men working with crowbars and pick axes, while the debris is thrown of the side of the mountain by children.