I’ve finished two galleries containing photographs taken in Bhutan (or as it’s sometimes known locally, Druk) where I spent a bit over a week earlier in 2018.
To prepare, I read Karma Phuntsho’s The History of Bhutan. It’s a modern history, in the sense it’s about the rigorous analysis of sources to establish facts, knowing what we know about the limits of the physical world. Mysticism, magic, and superstition is discarded, except to the extent it might, for instance, tell us what people actually believed, or that a myth might be a metaphor for something ‘real’, or hide a kernel of truth.
Read MoreI’ve just added a small set of travel photographs taken in Shiraz, Iran, together with extracts from some travellers passing through before me (accessible from the menu).
Honestly, I was a little burnt out from photography while I was in Shiraz, so there were whole parts of the city I couldn’t muster the concentration to shoot. The wide avenues, the abundant burger shops, the Arg, the innumerable orange-scented gardens, the dry river, the bazaar, the wonderful pickle shops, the people…it’s all in my head but not on camera.
But, I would like to share some of my favourite extracts I couldn’t pair with a photograph.
Read MoreI've just posted a series of the Iranian city of Isfahan, which was such a great place to spend a week doing street and architectural photography. You can wander around the old buildings, so many of them devoid of other tourists. I happily spent perhaps an hour alone in the north dome-chamber of the Friday Mosque, throwing my lens cap at the pigeons nesting in the crevices (sorry pigeons) to get a shot of them flying out the windows. But plenty of people are around, should you care for crowds, and so many were happy to hang around with a tourist.
Read MoreOne of the first photosets I’ve posted comes from a few days I spent in Dashoguz (in Turkmenistan) and Karakalpakstan (in Uzbekistan). Both have been dismissed by some travel writers as horrible, dreary and depressing, which to me is disingenuous. I thought I’d provide some more thoughts that I couldn’t fit into the captions.
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