Jochem Gugelot: Iran

Photo © Jochem Guegelot-All Rights Reserved

This is the second day in a row that I feature pure travel photography to The Travel Photographer blog...this time it's the work of Jochem Gugelot whose biography tells us that he lives in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and who's a freelance graphic designer and photographer.

The graphic influence is very much at play in Joachem's work. First of all, his galleries (what he calls photo series) are displayed in a very large size, which is what I've advocated for a few years now. When I am sent website galleries by photographers, I can't describe how much more receptive to featuring them when they consist of large images....to my eye, 1000x667 pixels ought to be the norm...but Joachem's are much larger than that. I view the site using a Chrome browser on a monitor of 1920x1080, and it's stunning.

Jocahem features his work from Iran, the Seychelles and the Maldives as well as a delightful photo series of the Himalayan Kingdoms. You'll also notice he's partial to low angles as well as photographing from above the scene. gallery of the Himalayan Kingdoms, which include Sikkim (and Darjeeling).

Out of all his series, I particularly like his work of Iran...a country long demonized by the US for no reason, and one that hasn't been sufficiently featured on my blog. You'll see a number of landscape photographs with a few street scenes. Jochem also included frames of Istanbul and Dubai in the gallery.

Of the Power of Travel Writing

Three American 'hikers' were detained in Iran after, apparently, straying across the Iraq-Iran border into a country that's surely paying attention to their writing records (one has reported from rebel-held territories in Sudan) as well as the pains the US went to to free journos in North Korea. The subject came up Thursday on NPR's On the Point, and I was feeling a fancy boots to be part of a huddle that included a State Department official and a former CIA guy. The latter, Robert Baer, guessed that the 'Berkeley bloggers' had to know what they're doing, saying he'd been 'in the area' and you have to 'cross on purpose.'

Not so, according to Joe of Joe's Trippin' blog, whom I found a couple hours earlier on Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree. He had been recently to the same hills outside Halabja, Iraq, and posted that 'it's impossible to know where Iraq ends and Iran begins.' I wrote him off-line to ask about it, and he told me: 'There used to be an open border just outside the city, but it has been closed for some time and there are no plans to open it. I was invited to celebrate with some locals in the hills, at which point they indicated (by pointing) there's Iran.'

That's not something noted in any articles of the event so far. And it's the place where travel journalists and travelers can fit into the news -- helping complete a picture that can all too often be skewed toward easily formed outside perceptions. Sometimes if you're only chasing news stories, you miss the story. Like the fact that Iraqi Kurdistan ('the Other Iraq') isn't what most would expect: it's a safe, booming place, with stylish cities with bowling alleys, whiskey bars and many locals who love Americans. Travel writing cannot replace traditional media, but (when not limited to crafting Top 10 lists) it can add to it.

Writers often strive to 'go further' than each other. Something that's been happening since way before 1890 when Anton Chekhov became the first 'Gulag tourist' by living in a penal colony on Sakhalin Island AND Joseph Conrad drifted up the heart-darkening Congo River. Often that leads travel writers to riskier, tougher places too, like Iraq. It can be a useful chest-beat, if the writer shows the broad, fair reality for those energized by the dreams dangled before them.

In a May article in the Guardian, for example, Kevin Rushby follows a fellow traveler who didn't 'give a flying f*ck' about the Foreign Office warnings against travel to Yemen. It's a fine article, and one that rightly dwells on the security issue of visiting, but I'm guessing that traveler, at least, felt differently a month later when nine tourists were slain there.

Sometimes a lot less is at stake in travel writing and experience. I've traveled across Bulgaria several times to write Lonely Planet's Eastern Europe guide. When a funny South African stoner I met at a Sofia hostel told me he was looking to buy property ('in the hills, with a garden and not many people around'), I knew where to point him: the eastern stretch of the Rodopi mountains, something not even in guidebooks yet. I forgot about it until last year, when I returned to Kardzhali in those same hills, and a local mentioned a nearby 'crazy South African guy.' We went to find him, driving one one-lane roads pastTurkish goat herders. And there he was, the same guy, now with a big home converted from an abandoned school in the hills, with a garden -- and his bong.

Bulgarian real estate agents focus on the beach or ski resorts. That tip came from being out there, traveling.

Mark Edward Harris: Inside Iran

Photo © Mark Edward Harris-All Rights Reserved
Iran has been grossly maligned for political reasons by the current administration, and most Americans know it as a member of the ridiculous "Axis of Evil" moniker used by Bush. The book Inside Iran by Mark Edward Harris may redress this view.

In 1986 Mark Edward Harris set off on a four-month trek across the Pacific and throughout Southeast Asia, China and Japan. The images created on that trip brought attention to his travel/documentary photography. He since has visited and photographed in over 60 countries. His editorial work has appeared in publications including Life, Stern, GEO, Conde Nast Traveler, Islands, Spa, Playboy, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Elle, American Photo, The New York Times, The London Times, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine as well as many in-flight magazines.

The above photograph of an elderly couple in presumably rural Iran is just wonderful.


Interview with Mark with an Iranian TV website on the book Inside Iran.

Ben Curtis: Bakhtiari Wedding

Photograph © Ben Curtis/AP-All Rights Reserved
Ben Curtis of SnapperTalk blog, brings us his work on a Bakhtiari Wedding while traveling in Iran. The audio was captured using a Zoom H2. Listening to the soundtrack, you'll hear the women's ululations, an ancient and traditional form of celebratory expressions in the Middle East and beyond.

The Bakhtiaris, who are Shi'a Muslims and speak a Persian dialect known as Luri, are one of two main nomadic groups in Iran, along with the ethnic Turkic Qashqai group. Iran has one of the largest nomadic populations in the world, an estimated 1.5 million in a country of some 70 million, according to the government's agency for nomad affairs.

Ben Curtis is currently based in Cairo, Egypt where he is Middle East Photographer & Photo Editor for the Associated Press.

Here's Ben Curtis' Bakhtiari Wedding

Newsha Tavakolian: Iran

Image © Newsha Tavakolian-All Rights Reserved
Newsha Tavakolian is a photojournalist working for Iranian press and media. She worked internationally in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. She has been published in Time magazine, Newsweek, Stern, Figaro and the New York Times.

I chose one of her very interesting photo essays for TTP: Entitled The Day I Became A Woman, it gives us a glimpse into the Shi'a Islam tradition that upon reaching the age of 9, a girl is considered a woman. In Teheran schools, that day is celebrated as Jashne Taklit, or "celebration of responsibility". While it's a largely symbolic celebration, it's from that day onwards that the girls have to wear a headscarf and start daily prayers at school. The girls are called "Angels", and although their parents may be secular or non-traditionalists, it's an important day in the lives of the families and their children.

Newsha Tavakolian's The Day I Became A Woman

Klavs Christensen: Women of Chah Faleh

Klavs is a Danish photographer who picked up photography as a hobby after graduating from The Royal Academy of Music. He started work as a freelance for various Danish magazines and organizations, and his work is based on social and cultural issues in his local neighborhood of downtown Copenhagen.

A few years ago he decided to do more work on stories of international interest but still with a focus on cultural, social and political issues. These have taken him to Iran, Egypt and Syria. He began working with WpN in January 2007.

I found his photographs of masked women from the village of Chah Faleh in south Iran to be most interesting. Many women in this region of Iran wear different kinds of masks. The tradition of these masks goes further back than the time when Islam came to Iran, but in this part of the country (especially in the villages) the tradition has been adapted as a part of hijab.

The traditional masks are black, some with gold. Within the last 30-40 years, the coloured masks started to show up and today they are subject to fashion. Klavs tells us that most of the women wearing the masks are doing it because of hijab, but some wear them only to protect their skin from the getting tanned by the sun.

Klavs Christensen