I don’t often go for artistic shots, but this lighthouse staircase in the big fishing port of Hvide Sande, in western Denmark, caught my eye.
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Light From Below
Tag: retro
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Maltese Megaliths
The limestone temples on the island of Malta rank among the world’s oldest religious sites. As with Stonehenge or the Ecuadorian Kalasaya, some of the site’s prehistoric monoliths were astronomically aligned. I aligned this daytime shot with a perfectly blue sky.
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Sad Roadside Attraction
A few tourists were willing to give this man a couple of rupees to be allowed to approach and touch his chained baby elephant.
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Dated In Palmyra
Hanging bunches of dates, a parked motorcycle, leisurely locals: This was part of what I saw in Palmyra, beyond its famous ruins, during a visit to Syria long before the civil war sadly changed the beautiful scenery.
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Delhi Grind
India’s capital, New Delhi, has long been known for its over-the-top traffic jams and erratic drivers — here’s how it looked 22 years ago.
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Horse-Drawn Time Machine
Granted, it was the “60s — but of which century?
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Former Member
Britain is making the news today. I took this shot in Edinburgh“s Princes Street, just five years after Scotland, as part of the UK, joined the European Union.
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Walking In A Painting
I’m not the only one to find the Alyscamps, near Arles in the south of France, picturesque. Both Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin immortalized the alley of sarcophagi in this great Roman necropolis.
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Laundry International
When you travel as much as I did, laundry drying in the heat is one of the sights you get to see around the world and through the ages.
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Herculean Skewer
This was a souvlaki of epic proportions, near the ancient site of Mycenae in southern Greece.
Our faithful Peugeot 404 makes a cameo appearance, with the Ribat fortress of Monastir in the background.
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Hard To Process
The penitent on the right-hand side of this picture was having a hard time breathing under his capirote, during Easter processions in southern Spain.
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The Other Island Of Tears
This monument on Minsk’s Island of Tears is dedicated to the memory of the Belarusian soldiers who died in the 1979-1988 Soviet-Afghan war.
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Well-Deserved Shade
The choir of traditional French music I was part of was often invited to folk festivals at home and abroad. One time in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in southern France, I was picked as a judge for a bourrée competition, and ended up watching people dance for hours under a scorching July sun. Needless to say, the dancers […]
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Back In The Saddle
Denmark, much like the Netherlands, is mostly flat. That helps explains why cycling has been the country’s transportation mode of choice for decades.
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The Lion Guards
In Tunisia’s capital, colorful Bardo guards kept a watchful eye on the Lion Staircase, one of the entrances leading to the parliament building inside the Bardo Palace.
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Not Nobel Yet
On our first trip to Norway (driving from France in our Peugeot 203), we stopped for a moment in Oslo before making our way to the country’s inland regions. You can see the capital’s new two-towered City Hall, which had been completed 10 years earlier. Three decades later, in 1990, it would become the site […]
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Napoleonic Trinkets
Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile on the Italian island of Elba, about 50 kilometers east of the French emperor’s native Corsica, was still commemorated when I went there 47 years ago, although with slightly unflattering knick-knacks in souvenir shops.
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Pricing Pawns
On Moscow’s Sparrow Hill, tourists can buy nestling dolls or wooden chess boards while enjoying the view over the Russian capital.
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Paella Epicenter
If you’re eating paella in a restaurant in Valencia, there’s a good chance you’re eating the real deal: The authentic paella valenciana was born there.
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Pigeon v. Macaw
The majestuous scarlet macaws flying about in Guatemala were a nice change from the birds I’m used to seeing in the streets of European cities.
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To Fallen Vikings
Sweden boasts about 1,700 such runestones that feature the old Scandinavian runic alphabet. This one, outside of Gripsholm Castle near Stockholm, was erected in memory of fallen Vikings.
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Picasso No More
In the second half of the 20th century, countless painters would set up their easels on the Place du Tertre, on top of Paris’s Montmartre hill. Some no doubt were trying to channel Picasso, who used to live nearby. By this point, the great Spanish master had set up shop in the quieter climes of […]
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High Power
I like the juxtaposition between this minaret and the improbable electrical entanglement in the foreground: Clearly, you needed to have faith to believe the whole thing was going to hold up.
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Southern Terminus
This is the “world famous conch train,” as it was — and still is — advertised, at the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys.
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Troublesome Visitors
The Alhambra palace, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, is a jewel of Islamic architecture, a testament to Moorish culture in the country. There would have been even more beauty to admire had my fellow Frenchmen from Napoleon’s armies not destroyed several towers 150 years before we arrived.
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The President’s City
When we went to eastern Tunisia in the 1970s, Monastir-born Habib Bourguiba was then serving as the country’s first president, having replaced King Muhammad VIII when the monarchy was abolished in 1957.
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Panoramic Dancing
These gaunt, alien-like musicians overlook Reykjavik, near the iconic Perlan observatory, giving an eerie feel to an already otherwordly landscape.
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Seven Skirts
The fishermen“s wives of yore used to wear seven colorful petticoats; some say to represent the seven waves in a set, others say to keep warm while awaiting their husbands’ return. In the late 1950s, these women working at Nazaré“s seafood market already considered it folklore, as they found it doubtlessly easier to carry their […]
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Brand New Brandy
By the start of the 1970s, some new technology had made it to the bottling line of this cognac distillery in southwestern France. Nevertheless, production was still very much a traditional affair: The famous brandy must be distilled twice in copper pot stills and aged at least two years in oak barrels.
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The Colors Of Santorini
Oia church, on the Greek island of Santorini, is a one-picture summary of the surrounding Cyclades islands, with its whitewashed walls and its blue dome.
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Little Glory
The Schönbrunn Palace, formerly the summer residence of successive Austrian monarchs, is one of the country’s most majestic Baroque designs. It even features a Gloriette (a “little glory”), a building whose rooftop overlooks the magnificent gardens.
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Portuguese Postcard
The fine sandy beaches of Nazaré, in western Portugal, are probably as big a tourist draw as the painted boats and the fishermen’s traditional costumes.
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Final Picnic
I’ve already told you how my wife and I liked to wander off the beaten path and picnic somewhere nice. This time we’d picked a vast meadow — only to discover that the place was next to a cemetery, which apparently had a little problem with upkeep … Bon appétit!
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Taj Mahal, Italy
Italian craftsmen shared their know-how with Indian lapidarists who were then able to execute the exquisite inlaid marble of the Taj Mahal. And the more I look I at it, the more the iconic Indian mausoleum reminds me of the Florence Cathedral.
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My Kind Of Tree
This big plant we came across in Guadeloupe is nicknamed “traveller’s tree,” supposedly because its sheaths can hold rainwater. But the murky and foul-smelling water this one held made me glad I never was that thirsty.
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Where All Roads Seem To Lead
This looks like Rome’s Colosseum, but is actually the Arena of Nîmes in southern France. When I took this picture, archeological digging was still taking place in the Roman amphitheatre, which nowadays serves as a concert venue.
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High Income
Gstaad is home to one of the largest ski areas in the Alps. The breathtaking mountainous views — not to mention Switzerland“s advantageous fiscal regime — draw in the rich and famous from around the world.
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Before The Lights
I took this photo from the window of the classroom in the early days of my career as a high school philosophy teacher in my hometown in eastern France. Back then, before traffic lights arrived in town, policemen with their white staffs were still in charge of keeping the traffic flowing.
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Pigeon Square
BašÄaršija square is one of the landmarks of Sarajevo’s old town, where everybody comes to sit around and talk and drink. But we tourists know it as “the Pigeon Square”.