If a CEO starts quoting Churchill or some Silicon Valley titan to give pomp to their office speeches, they’re only highlighting their utter lack of originality and leadership.
Author: Bertrand Hauger
Bertrand Hauger is a graduate of La Sorbonne Nouvelle school of bilingual journalism, and joined Worldcrunch after working briefly as a reporter in a local newspaper in his native eastern France. He now serves as Worldcrunch’s deputy editor-in-chief and director of content.
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Unexpectedly Lush
You’d expect the mountainous Epirus region, in northwestern Greece, to be somewhat dry. But the shores of the beautiful lake Pamvotis bring some welcome greenery to the inland.
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A Long Time Since Tipperary
Some photos speak for themselves, others can use a little explaining. Though I took this shot almost 40 years ago, seeing it brought back some vivid memories: For starters, our meal at “Chez Hans,” housed in a former church in County Tipperary in the south of Ireland, was delicious. Despite its Franco-German sounding name — […]
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Leaning Tree Of Denmark
I was in Denmark multiple times, usually on our way to get up north to Sweden and Norway — and never disappointed by the scenery along the way. This shot stands out for the tree leaning over the stream and the vivid green contrasts, though I also did my best to catch the blond cyclist […]
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A Marble Souvenir
To help me remember where I’ve been, along my 60+ years of travels, I have amassed a decent collection of rocks, pebbles, bits of bark — in addition to my 20,000 slides. On the floor of this extraordinary Jain temple in northwestern India, a tiny fragment of marble was waiting for me to pick it […]
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Wouldn’t It Be Nice
The setting and timing of this shot coincide perfectly with the release, half-way around the world, of the seminal surfer album Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. But this summer in Romania was also just a year after the rise of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. We didn’t know it then, but he would become one […]
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Chinese Apparel
I stumbled upon a parade in full traditional attire in the lush gardens of Suzhou, in eastern China. What I like most about this shot is the pair’s symmetrical contrast with the man and woman in contemporary uniforms just over their respective right shoulders.
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Olympic Pause
Running, discus throw, long jump, javelin throw, wrestling … After learning all about the Ancient Olympic Games, my wife was enjoying a well-deserved break in the shade, sitting on the ruins of the sanctuary of Olympia where the very first competitions were held.
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View From A Batak Backyard
It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Batak houses of Indonesia’s North Sumatra are not there only for the tourists’ viewing pleasure — people actually live in them. All you need to do is take a little walk around the impressive facades to get a glimpse of the Batak’s way of life.
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Lining Up For Lenin
Even a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, people were lining up in Red Square to get a glimpse of Vladimir Lenin: the Communist leader’s embalmed body remains on display inside the mausoleum.
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Seattle From The Needle
That’s the beauty of shooting with a telelens: From the top of the famous Space Needle, I was able to see details of downtown Seattle — more than a mile away.
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Heroic Minsk
Minsk is a former Hero City: a Soviet title awarded to 12 cities for their “outstanding services to the Motherland” during World War II. The honor came with an obelisk.
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Baltic Leitmotiv
A man busking in the shade, a charming archway … Going through my archives, this picture looked so familiar that I thought I’d already shown it here on Worldcrunch. But I was actually thinking of a different photograph that I took, as luck would have it, during the same tour of the Baltic states, in […]
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Heavily Heavenly
Nirvana comes at a price — and a weight: 5.5 tons of gold, to be more precise, in the case of the Golden Buddha, in Bangkok’s Wat Traimit temple.
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A Quieter Hong Kong
If I asked you to think about Hong Kong, the first images that would come to mind would probably be of rush-hour traffic and vertigo-inducing skyscrapers. But my wife and I were surprised to discover its many bays and soft white sand beaches.
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Cassis Port To Starboard
I’ve taken shots of fishing boats around the world. There were the ever colorful luzzus of Malta and the Phoenician-inspired shapes of the vessels of Nazaré, The traditional fishing boats here in the southern French port of Cassis are called “pointus,” for their pointy shape.
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Costume Curiosity
As the conductor of a traditional French choir, I was invited several times to the international music festival in Llangollen, in Wales, where I got to see costumes from around the world. Here, a singer from my choir studies a woman in a rural Welsh costume that includes an apron and a tall felt hat.
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Germany, Time And Time Again
I live in France near the border with Germany. The proximity has meant that my wife and I have visited Germany 32 times — yes, 32. On these trips, we were able to discover many of the country’s hidden jewels, such as this church, St. Bartholomew’s, on the western shore of Bavaria“s beautiful Königssee lake.
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Postcard From The Ganges
Oh, to watch the sun setting over the Ganges and the ghats of Varanasi …
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Picture Please?
I don’t often photograph people. I prefer to take pictures of places, mostly to remember where I went. But I did click photos of these two Catholic women on the Italian island of Sardinia. They were too photogenic to pass up the opportunity. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Hitchcock Do Brasil
At low tide, the port of Belem, in northern Brazil, looked like a scene from The Birds. Blame it on the nearby Ver-o-Peso market — and the rotting remnants of fish the birds were feasting on. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Try To Stand Still Life
The lights were dimmed inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. So when my wife moved a bit during the shot, it gave her a bit of a surrealistic blur next to this 17th-century Dutch genre painting. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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French Naval Pride
We French call our country “la France.” But when we speak of “le France,” that’s the SS France — once the biggest ocean liner in the world. In my 60 years of travels, I’ve found myself twice in its wake: here in the late 1960s, off the pier of Cannes in southern France; and some […]
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German Folklore In The Flesh
Is that you, Rübezahl? See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Floating By The Sugarloaves
Near Guilin, my wife and I hopped on a short cruise on the Li River. The makeshift houseboats built from discarded modern materials were interesting to look at, but clashed with the scenic surroundings of sugarloaf hills and gorges in southern China. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Libération, July 24, 2017 Leading French daily Libération showed its support for embattled Turkish opposition daily Cumhuriyet, as a trial gets underway for 17 journalists and staff members on charges of aiding a terrorist organization. The front page for this special Libération with Cumhuriyet edition features a cartoon — a meaningful choice of expression in […]
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One Tile At A Time
Hard at work under the Tunisian sun, these men were playing their small part in restoring some grandeur to the mosaics of the ancient city of Carthage. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Sardinia In Sepia
At some point during the late 1970s, I started experimenting with a different brand of film — Agfacolor — over the next decade or so. Good thing I usually stuck with my usual Kodachrome: The tones on this Agfacolor shot of a picnic, on a Sardinian cliff, have not aged well at all … See […]
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Welcome To The Jungle
Not far from Belem, the gateway to the Amazon River, my wife and I (together with our fellow travelers from our organized tour of Brazil) stepped into the rainforest for a short walk — just enough to get a taste of it without having to fight off any anacondas. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s […]
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Legendary Cathedral
Don’t be fooled by the exuberant Moorish style of the Curtea de Argeș cathedral. The various legends associated with this Romanian Orthodox church tend to be, well, grim. In one tale, the architect — to be able to finish the building — is forced to sacrifice his wife by walling her alive in the cathedral. […]
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My (Great) Grand-Père’s World
My grandson — Worldcrunch’s photo editor and once a chubby baby in my wife’s arms — has just made me a great-grandfather for the fourth time. Bienvenue to the world, Félix! The new dad’s two older sisters, posing in this family portrait in the Austrian Tyrol, have already given me three adorable great-granddaughters. While my […]
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Model Mosque
The Great Mosque of Kairouan, in Tunisia, is considered a model of Islamic art. Its minaret, one of the oldest in the world, served as a template for how many minarets were later built in neighboring North African countries, as well as Spain’s Andalusia region. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Critica, May 30, 2017 “El Man Dies,” reads Tuesday’s front page of Panamanian daily Critica, reporting the death of former dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama City at age of 83, with one of his many monikers. Noriega, who died Monday night, was called MAN for the acronym for Manuel Antonio Noriega, although the New York […]
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Off With Their Names
Hong Kong was still under British rule when we visited it. This strangely shaped building was then named the Prince of Wales Building and housed the head office of the British Army. In 1997, when the island became an autonomous territory of China, it was renamed: Chinese People’s Liberation Army Forces Hong Kong Building — […]
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Golden Russia
The banks of the Neva River in Saint Petersburg were glistening like gold during this beautiful summer sunset. You can see the extra shine in Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, which may be because its dome is plated with pure gold. See more sides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Unsinkable Legend
That’s no gator — this here is Captain Nemo’s mighty Nautilus, born from French 19th-century author Jules Verne“s imagination. About as soon as I learned to read, I’d immerse myself in Captain Nemo’s adventures aboard this futuristic submarine, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. Later, when I was in high […]
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Worth Every Step
Climbing 400 or so stairs is all it took my wife Claudine and I to get to mingle with the gargoyles at the top of the Notre Dame cathedral, and enjoy an breathtaking view of Paris — including Montmartre and the Sacré-Coeur basilica. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
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Syrian Water Wheels Keep On Turning
Like much of the rest of the country, Syria’s fourth-largest city, Hama, has been left victim of the brutal civil war repeatedly over the past six years. Still, its most prized antiquities, these big Byzantine-era norias that keep water turning, are still standing. The same, sadly, cannot be said in Palmyra. See more slides from […]
-Analysis- “This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse,” Spanish-born painter Pablo Picasso once said of his iconic 1937 painting Guernica. Eighty years later, the horrifying depiction of the Spanish Civil War bombing of a Basque town — history’s first attack from the air on a civilian population — stands as one […]
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Head Over Heels
Photography works in mysterious ways. This frozen moment of some graceful Bulgarian folk dancers in Varna somehow looks terribly clumsy. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.