Worldcrunch
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.
Don’t worry: This little vessel in the port of Caraquet, New Brunswick, was not about to crash down. It was simply attached to the hull of a bigger fishing boat.
The Watergate complex may be the most famous building in Washington, D.C. for the wrong reasons — and we didn’t even have to break in to visit it!
Once the fish had been caught, the fisherman’s wife in Nazaré would put them directly on the grill for breakfast. Bom apetite!
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.
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.
When I visited the prehistoric site of Stonehenge in southern England, it was still possible to walk among, and even touch, the megaliths. Not for long, though: A year later, the damage to the standing stones caused by erosion forced the authorities to start keeping visitors at a safe distance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
House for rent, move in date after Nov. 8. Quiet neighborhood, 18 acres of grounds, well-equipped security system. (Exterior unchanged from date of photograph, alterations to interior; tenant at the time: George H. W. Bush.)
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 […]
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.
Meet Thotsakan, a demon from the Hindu epic Ramakien guarding one of the entrances to Bangkok’s Wat Arun Buddhist temple.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Under the authoritarian regime of Josip Broz Tito in then Yugoslavia, lots of shop windows were empty. Roadside vendors were a more reliable source of food there, with watermelons being a staple of domestic agriculture.
About a hundred kilometers south of the Himalaya mountain range, the village of Chobhar is a far cry from the country’s bustling and polluted capital, Kathmandu.
With my RDA-made Exakta Varex camera, I tried my hand at some macrophotography. I processed the film myself in a home-made darkroom.
In between visiting the wonders of the nearby city of Jerash and the desertic Wadi Rum valley, we stopped for the night in Jordan’s capital Amman. And scenes like this one in the hotel lobby were as memorable as the country’s ancient ruins and wondrous landscapes.
In the Bharatpur bird sanctuary, these long-billed vultures had built their nests in the trees. These vultures are more widely found around the cities of Mumbai and Karachi, where the Parsi community’s rituals include leaving its dead outside to be eaten by the scavenger bird species.
I’ve already told you about the fishermen’s wives of Nazaré, and the seven petticoats they’d wear traditionally in this Portuguese town. The fishermen“s costumes are just as interesting. Although granted, they do look a little bit like pajamas.
Though definitely not the most impressive watefalls I got to see, the Gullfoss cataract (not far from other popular Icelandic landmarks like Þingvellir or the “father of all geysers“) gives the eerie impression that the water disappears into the earth.
Ask anyone in France about Brittany, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you how bad the weather is in the northwestern region. Looks like blue skies to me!
Wrought iron restaurant signs are a German specialty, and usually point famished travellers like me toward excellent Gasthaus food. But not far from Tangermünde, where I took this shot, a different sort of iron still separated Europe in two.
While other tourists were busy buying “traditional” crafts, I took many pictures of members, young and old, of the Hmong people of Chiang Rai, in northern Thailand.
Although there have been all-inclusive winter resorts by “Club Méditerranée” since the 1950s, it was still strange to come across one in the mountainous landscape of the Austrian Tirol.
There was a documentary on French TV a couple of days ago about the khlong canals that crisscross Bangkok. Not much seems to have changed since I went there 23 years ago, except for one thing: Running water has made its way to the nearby houses, so people no longer drink directly from the turbid […]
There are no more “Beguines” in the Beguinage: In the early 20th century, these lay nuns were replaced by Benedictines, pictured here walking in front of the convent, with Bruges’ Church of Our Lady visible through the leaves.
Too bad slides can’t convey the sounds and odors of a given time and space. Coming across this image from Paris, I can still hear and smell the flower and bird market on the Île de la Cité where my wife Claudine and I were taking a walk one day.
Aleppo’s al-Madina souk, the world’s largest covered historic market, was a highlight on our visit to what was then a bustling, cosmopolitan and altogether very pleasant city. It has been sad to watch from afar as so much of it has been devastated during the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
A stone’s throw away from Salt Lake City’s Mormon Tabernacle is the Utah State Capitol building, the site where famously strict regulations on alcohol have been approved because of the Mormon religion that still dominates the state. I was surprised however to find that one could order French wine in the local restaurants.
On a warm Spring day at the southern tip of the French island of Corsica, it was time to go home and take a siesta.
This Arlecchino belonged to a band from Bergamo that had made the trip to my native eastern France. Parading in the streets of Montbéliard, this character from the Commedia dell’arte was participating in the folk singing and dancing festival organized by the choir I used to conduct.