Worldcrunch
Mauritius has developed a certain fascination for the craft of ship modeling. In the island’s massive-miniature workshop, some 3,000 people make sure that every tiny detail, from mast to hull, is faithful to the original vessel of the past.
Neither Mormon, nor Amish — just some actors bringing 19th Acadia back to life in the open-air museum of Village Historique Acadien in Canada’s New Brunswick.
Our first and only visit to South Africa was three years after the end of Apartheid. In Durban, we stayed in five-star style at The Royal, the city’s oldest hotel, which first opened in 1845.
Our various road trips through North Africa almost always included encounters with caravans of Berber nomads and their camels, making their way to bigger cities to resupply.
In the puszta grassland valley of eastern Hungary, this csikós wrangler was just warming up before performing an incredible stunt show on galloping horses.
Glastonbury Abbey, in southern England, is held by some as King Arthur’s final resting place — the mythical Avalon. When I photographed his fabled tomb, I was experimenting with a different brand of film that, as the decades went by, turned the green grass a strange tinge of blue and the red sign pink.
To beat the gloominess of a rainy winter afternoon, I put aside my book and went through my sunny slides of Turkey. This one shows the road leading to the Library of Celsus in Ephesus.
Over the years, I took pictures of license plates — they’d help me remember where I went without having to write things down in a notebook. But there was a different, more personal reason for photographing this motorbike plate on the Greek island of Corfu: “Ety,” short for Etienne, was what my mother called me […]
It took 14 tourists — including my wife and I — to eat a gigantic omelette made with a single ostrich egg. But when it came to riding one at this South African farm, I thought better to let my fellow travelers make fools of themselves!
Whenever I go back to the boxes of slides from my two trips to Syria, in 1972 and 1996, and look at the archeological wonders, I inevitably ask myself: Is this still standing. Sadly, the answer is usually “no.” Years of civil war and looting have left the ancient capital of Apamea with a similar […]
This is the capital of Belize, the tiny state in Central America. Unlike colorful cities in neighboring Mexico and Guatemala, I remember the capital Belmopan as a particularly uninspiring subject, its drab streets dotted with banks and jewelry stores — and this one theater.
On two separate trips, we visited the Hofburg imperial palace you see here in the bustling center of Vienna, as well as the emperors’ exuberantly baroque summer residence at Schönbrunn. Even if this photograph is better, my memory is quite clear that the summer palace was far more stunning in person.
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 […]
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.
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.
Oh, to watch the sun setting over the Ganges and the ghats of Varanasi …
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Driving around Romania during one of the hottest summers I can remember, I got to see the many faces of daily life — in both sadness and joy. These traditionally dressed locals were bringing cake to a wedding. No sign of ice cream. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Ghardaïa is famous for its carpets. At the marketplace, there weren’t any women — but there were plenty of fabrics in this corner of M’zab in Algeria. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Ready for take off and marveling at the Andes in the distance, I took stock of the things I was lucky enough to see during my trip to Peru: from the heights of Machu Picchu to Lake Titicaca and its islands made of reed, to the incredible geoglyphs of the Nazca Desert and of course […]
The Hornberger Uhrenspiele, in Germany’s scenic Black Forest, holds the record for biggest cuckoo clock in the world. My wife and I got to see it just a month after its inauguration, and watched the house-size clock’s wooden characters come to life to the tune of traditional German melodies. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s […]
It is cold in the Lofoten islands of Norway, even in the summer. Not so cold that the fish freezes — just cold enough that salted cod can dry on racks in the sun and wind without rotting. The resulting delicacy, klippfisk, is pretty darn good. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
There are several such typical watering holes and fountains along the winding roads of Corsica. They come in handy when your daughter is thirsty. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
During the Tito-era of communist rule in then-Yugoslavia, agricultural workers gathered every morning, tools in hand, and waited for someone to hire them for the day.
This was the end of the road for us: Driving with my family from France in our Peugeot 404, our goal was to go as far north as possible, by way of Denmark and Sweden. What I didn’t know was that back then, about 100 kilometers north of the Norwegian capital Oslo, roads were in […]
We traveled to the historical Spanish region known as Old Castile to soak in some of its timeless quiet for a night in the only hotel of a small village. A pack of howling stray dogs decided otherwise … See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
This was beyond a cross-country summer trip. From my hometown in eastern France, I had to drive across the whole country, heading for Britanny. I then carried on westward to the Finistère department. Then hopped on a boat for about an hour and voilà: I got to the small and picturesque island of Ouessant (Ushant), […]
This traditional blacksmith, in the open-air museum of Village Historique Acadien in Canada’s New Brunswick province, brought back memories of my hometown. I grew up — and still live — near one of the oldest forges in France.
These young Syrians in the western city of Homs paused from playing a mock game of war to look my way for a photograph. Current Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, whose father had taken power two years earlier in Damascus, was about the same age as these kids. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
Little penitent during a Palm Sunday procession in Andalusia, southern Spain.
There is more to folk dancing than the famous “Dragon Dance” … Feather Fan Dance, Ribbon Dance, Sword Dance — my wife and I spent an evening enjoying them all. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
In Greece, everywhere you go and everything you see can easily take on a mythological aura. When you’re well-versed in the ancient Greek texts — as a high school philosophy teacher like me was bound to be — a seemingly mundane pier like this might actually seem to be the mooring for Charon’s boat, carrying […]