The Triumph of Urgench

Our Cultural Envoy entourage including: Lisa our diplomat, Muhayo the decider, Rustam my interpreter, and Frank the presenter arrived at the Urgench State College of Arts to the sounds of long horns and drums. The audience takes shelter from the heat along a shady wall as the festivities begin.

Once inside the building all manner of creativity springs forth. We enter a room lined with student art and another great band playing like crazy. And the dancing begins.

After about a half hour of wild dancing and music, it is time for me to present.  We enter an adjacent auditorium which has 300 people sitting there waiting for us. The picture below is after I presented as I was a bit embarrassed to photograph them while they were applauding our arrival.

 See those two guys with video and flood lights? Well, they insisted on filming me and the slide show, which means their flood lights washed out my slides on the screen. Normally, I would be upset, but this was different, way different. After I finished there was a Q&A with wild applause for every answer I gave. Then they announced a little show to celebrate our visit to the school.

 The young lady in green jumped off the stage and grabbed me to dance. You bet I danced.

Muhayo took a video of both Lisa's and my attempt at Khorezm dancing. Lisa, always the diplomat, did a great job of looking fantastic dancing with a girl with 5 feet of hair. I had to grab the girl in green by the hands to keep her from getting too fancy and making me really look inept. I may never post that video.

After an hour of dancing, gifting, group portraits and at least 3 bouquets of flowers, we settled into the truly wonderful director's spacious office. We sat down to the best plov I've ever had. After our unphotographed lunch the music started up again. This rabob player was doing an incredibly complex western classical piece. He was followed by two girls on dueling dutars who were also fantastic. They were followed by opera singers, a sax player professor, a middle school violinist, several pianists and more talent that one could fit in Carnegie Hall. It was amazing. Then the incredibly generous director says, "...let's take the afternoon off." We are ecstatic. I don't have to present again that day. We were all exhausted from experiencing so much talent and energy.

The next morning the terrific director (Did I mention he was fabulous, yet?) arranged for us to photograph with students in a working photo studio. What he didn't mention was that the studio would be open for business while we were trying to have a workshop. We would work on my zany ideas of what I thought we should do in a studio and every 10 minutes we would stop and reset the lights for a paying customer with a conventional portrait. It was fun.

This is Muhayo who basically is the go-to person for my whole cultural envoy experience. We have spent several days together and yet this is the first time I noticed that she has 3 feet. Later that evening in Khiva, I photograph Muhayo again just to check on her feet. I'm pleased to see that my previous picture was just another situation where the camera does lie.

Cental Asia Return

Vivian and I are on the verge of our spring 2010 trip to Central Asia. We leave in two and a half weeks. We don't have any visas, yet, but we've got tickets. The problem is that the airline won't let you on the plane unless you have a visa for where you are landing. No problem, maybe.

The above picture of a classroom in the Tajikistan Pamirs is from 2009. What kind of pictures will I be looking for on this trip? Because Vivian spends time almost every day teaching teachers, I'll continue to picture education. It is consistently amazing to see the intelligence and grace of the teachers and students in Central Asia. They are teaching and learning in the midst of often broke down conditions.

Ultimately, my photography is about whatever happens to be in front of me. I know it is not a very sophisticated approach to documenting the world. It is really a way of documenting my own state of well being. Years of listening to jazz is a possible inspiration for this approach. In jazz, the song, or head, is the starting point for the musician to work around. S/He usually plays the tune once through and then lets inspiration flow. For me, the city or town offers the basic structure for possible visual riffs or explorations.

I've been a meditator since my early 20s. My kind of photography relates to the experience of sitting. I start with whatever watchfulness I can muster. It is similar to walking out onto the street, or into a space. While sitting, I observe whatever is going on in my mind and body. It's just like being a photo eye on the world. I never know what is about to envelope me. I only know what I am seeing at the moment. Just like meditation, there are times when I come back to the present moment and realize I've just spent a nonspecific stretch of time lost in thought, or, as in photography, engrossed in a fleeting situation in the world. It's all OK.

Well, maybe it isn't. Meditating is not a results oriented experience. I let go of achieving something with sitting practice awhile ago. I realize that, at the very least, meditating keeps me out of trouble for the time I am just sitting.

Photography is results oriented. Our attic is filled with my pictures. On this trip I want to let go of the impulse to collect a little pile of picture treasures. I'll let my camera simply note the world as it passes by. The pictures can be the residue of my experience of the world. Dodrup Chen Rimpoche, a Tibetan teacher who has been very important to me, once said, "the archer doesn't have to proclaim that he has hit the target. Everyone can see that he has hit the target."

Pass me another arrow, please.

Gymnasium floor, Russia, 2009