The Importance Of Water
But for me the monsoons are a glorious time of colour, texture, clean air, and vibrancy.
In the past I've posted images that explore various aspects of the rains and how they impact the travel photographer. This time I thought I would explore how the rain, or more specifically water, plays such an important roll in our day to day life here in Myanmar.
On every street, on most corners, in front of rich people's homes, poor people's too, by a temple, or tire repair shop you will find a water cooler. No not some high tech electric device but an age old low tech water cooler. The clay pots cool the water by evaporation through the porous nature of the clay and the result is clean fresh cool water that is a life saver in the heat of the day.
These water coolers are offered by the home owner, the business owner, the school, the monastery or pagoda to anyone walking by. Some sit in ornate shelters, a statement of the wealth and opulence of the person offering the water. Others sit onto of a little plastic chair or on top of an old tire, a statement of humility and generosity. All are offered out of respect for the community and the acknowledgment that we all need water to live.
Here are just a few of the many water coolers I've come across in my wanderings and of the refreshing beauty and art that these whimsical water coolers create. And cool water too!
“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
― Karl Lagerfeld
“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
― Ansel Adams
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag
“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”
― Marc Riboud
“You don't take a photograph, you make it.”
― Ansel Adams
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
― Dorothea Lange
“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams
“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
― Robert Frank
“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ”
― Yann Arthus-Bertrand
“Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.”
― Kim Edwards
“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
― Ansel Adams
“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
― Robert Frank
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ”
― Salman Rushdie
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ”
― Richard Avedon
“Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer”
― Walter De Mulder
“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
― Alfred Stieglitz
“Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference”
― Robert Frank
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
― Elliott Erwitt
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson
“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
― Diane Arbus
“A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.”
― Amit Kalantri
“A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.”
― Brigitte Bardot
I look forward to seeing you out there.
Thank you,
Julian Ray
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