I’ve had my fair share of beautiful sunrises and sunsets, but watching the Grand Canyon get more and more red, in the serenity of the rising sun, stands out in my memory.
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A Grand Sunrise
Tag: photography
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Austro-Hungarian Fashion
The city of Rust, in eastern Austria, stands near the border with Hungary. This geographical and cultural proximity was particularly visible in the way the women dressed, on their way to the market.
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Brediterranean View
The Mediterranean island of Malta has kept many traces of its British past: Bedford buses (driving on the left side of the road), pubs, and these beautiful bow windows overlooking the beautiful port of Valletta.
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Camel Calm
What became of the camels of Palmyra, now that there are no tourists to hire them for a ride?
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Chic Chalk
Now that“s what I call street art…!
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Balance And The Beast
This Batak woman, in a Toraja village of Indonesia, was balancing a rice bowl on her head during the traditional dance performance. A beautiful moment, followed by the not-so-beautiful moment of the ritual slaughter of the unsuspecting water buffalo in the background.
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Bridging The Times
In the heart of the colorful moor of southern England, the Postbridge clapper bridge was built with large flat stones back in the 14th century. Beauty meets utility.
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Going North
I crossed the Arctic Circle on several occasions — but always under the same polar sun and blue sky.
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Sizzling Sardines
Once the fish had been caught, the fisherman’s wife in Nazaré would put them directly on the grill for breakfast. Bom apetite!
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McDonald’s German Blend
Traveling the world means seeing different attempts to blend bad American culinary imperialism into local cityscapes. Here the golden arches ruin an otherwise characteristic Wilhemian facade in this old city center in western Germany.
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Far From Pharaohs
Twenty-six years ago, cranes were busy working on brand new buildings in Cairo. The Egyptian capital was still some distance away from the Pyramids of Giza, though the modern neighborhoods are now slowly encroaching on the iconic structures.
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Worldwide Safari
Zebras, lions, elephants, alligators, rhinos … I have seen animals in their local habitats all across the planet. Naturally, this guy in South Africa was the tallest.
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This Is Not A Pipe
As Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte would say: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Resting for a second on a column in the sanctuary of Olympia, my wife Claudine snapped this shot of me most probably chewing on a twig or a toothpick — for I was one of the few French philosophy teachers in the […]
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Infernal Dante
Dante Alighieri is buried in this tomb, in Ravenna. The story of the quarrel surrounding the 13th-century poet’s remains, disputed between this city in northern Italy where he was exiled, and his native Florence, is long and fascinating.
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The Condor Offer
The majestic Andean condor is one of the largest birds in the world. After this one displayed its impressive wingspan, an elderly animal-rights activist from our organized tour, got into a heated discussion with the owner of the bird. She wanted to buy the condor in order to set it free.
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La Belle Americaine
Sorry, ladies: When Frenchmen like me talk of “une belle Américaine,” they’re most likely thinking of cars like this Pontiac Star Chief parked in front of Disneyland in California.
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Buddhist Birdhouse?
Flowers and clothes drying are regular features of backyards bordering the khlong canals of Bangkok. This picture, taken from a boat, also shows what is probably a Buddhist shrine of sorts — but definitely looked like a fancy birdhouse to me.
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Flying Blind
Taken from the window of my hotel room, in Ghardaïa, in northern Sahara’s M’zab region.
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The Bigger Picture
The 1960s was a momentous period for the French island of Corsica, caught between opening up to tourism and dealing with a growing nationalistic movement. But in Ajaccio on that sunny spring day, it was just fishing business as usual.
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Without Further Commercialism
The quaint fishing harbor of Polperro, on southwestern England“s Cornwall coast, is having a hard time delivering on its promise: Unscrupulous parking lot owners have been known to capitalize on car park fees.
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Hop On, Hop Off
For more than a century now, the Coastal Express has been a staple of the wonderful Norwegian coast, taking passengers through barren landscapes and fertile lands, large towns and fishing hamlets nesting in magnificent fjords.
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European Timber
These half-timbered structures of the Den Gamle By open-air museum in the Danish town of Aarhus remind me of some houses in the eastern French region of Alsace and across the border in Germany.
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Parisian Prestige
The Sorbonne University, in the center of Paris, is the second oldest university in the world. No, not behind Oxford — behind Bologna. I took this shot of the Chapelle Sainte Ursule de la Sorbonne more than 50 years before my grandson and partner-in-crime went to one of the university’s branches, just a few hundred […]
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Forbidden Fun
I was lucky enough to see some of the world’s greatest treasures at a time when there were few fences and rarely entrance fees. But even when there were limits, like here in Hadrian’s Villa near Rome, they were of little concern for my daughter Cécile.
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Demon Door
Meet Thotsakan, a demon from the Hindu epic Ramakien guarding one of the entrances to Bangkok’s Wat Arun Buddhist temple.
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Palm Color
The Palmeral of Elche in southeastern Spain is the biggest palm grove of its kind in Europe. Its shades of green made it the perfect place for me to experiment with color film for the first time.
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Four Hundred Pleats
There are 400 pleats in the kilt-like fustanella worn by the Evzones guards who patrol Athens’ Syntagma Square. That’s one pleat per year of Ottoman occupation. Now I wonder what the pompoms on the clogs stand for …
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Basket Surprise
You’re never quite sure of what’s in the wicker baskets of the street peddlers in Jaipur. It could be some fresh fruit or vegetables — or a cobra!
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That’s Advertisement
The Bay of Fundy, on the Atlantic coast of Canada, boasts the highest tides in the world … and apparently some of the tallest suds as well.
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Sturdy Sentinel
For centuries, the thick walls of the Saksaywaman citadel have been looking over the valley of Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire.
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Southeastern Smile
There’s something striking about Southeast Asian countries: More than any of the countless other places where I’ve pulled out my camera, people like this rickshaw driver on the Indonesian island of Java, would naturally just smile back at me.
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Here Comes The Calvary
This stone calvary in western France’s Brittany region depicts scenes from the life and death of Jesus with incredible attention to detail — and someone on Wikipedia was kind enough to explain it all exhaustively.
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RIP Valley Of Tombs
Next to the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra lay several funerary towers known as the Valley of the Tombs. You can see them in the background of this photograph, as my wife Claudine walks among local ethnic Druze. Sadly, we know that the first-century necropolis was destroyed by ISIS terrorists last year. Some Druze villages, […]
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Enough On My Plate
Taking pictures of license plates allowed me to remember where I took this or that series of photographs without having to write it down. When you’re dealing with over 20,000 slides, it comes in handy.
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The Philosopher’s Stone
The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant spent most of his life in Königsberg, in what was then known as Prussia. HIs mausoleum has seen borders and names change: The city is now a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania called Kaliningrad.
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Fountain Of Youth
Can you spot the little red riding hood playing in L’Aquila’s Fontana delle 99 cannelle (“The Fountain of the 99 Spouts”)? Luckily, the landmark fountain suffered only minor damage during the deadly 2009 earthquake.
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Rembrandt In Ecuador
It was rather quiet when we got to the indigenous town of Otavalo, in northern Ecuador, and I was able to take my time photographing a woman using a big spinning wheel. The image ended up looking something like a Flemish painting.
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A Tombstone Maker’s Death
Among the tombstones at Petersfriedhof cemetery in the Austrian city of Salzburg are those that are not stones at all, but intricate works of wrought iron.
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Our Ladies Of The Snow
The statue of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Our Lady of the Snow) marks the top of the Bavella Pass, in central Corsica. In this photograph, the serene but somewhat austere statue stands in stark contrast with our playful daughter Cécile posing under the road sign.
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Stars And Strifes
In Philadelphia, a group of U.S. Marines were petitioning to change the Constitution and make any desecration of the American flag a crime. That hasn’t happened, though the debate over national symbols is apparently still very much alive across the Atlantic.