Photo Hodgepodge: Delhi – Vienna – London – Dublin

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Dublin, India, London, Vienna

Way back – last summer – I was going to post some more photographs from when I was staying with my Dad in India, but somehow that never happened.

Since this is mostly a film blog, let’s start with something on topic: a classic Bollywood poster. I have no idea what the film is about (although we easily can make a somewhat educated guess), but whenever I’m in India I take snaps of movie posters. Just because.

#1 Bollywood.

Place Promised in Our Early Days: Dublin

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Shinkai Makoto

I flew into Dublin earlier today (I’m here for an academic conference). While the guy at the reception of place where I am staying was giving me directions for downtown, he grumbled that I would have to pass by Dublin’s ugly “needle” – which very obviously he didn’t like.

But when I did walk past, I could not help but smile:「雲のむこう、約束の場所」 (Kumo no Mukō, Yakusoku no Basho/The Place Promised in Our Early Days, 2004) instantly came to mind.

Photologia: Around Vasant Vihar, New Delhi

Note: All photographs copyright by alualuna. Please do not use without permission. Also: large resolution, page may take a while to load.

Not the best of photographs – terribly overexposed. But this kid ran into my picture (which was meant to be of the barbershop in the background) and it ended up like this. I edited what I could (darkening mostly and cropping a bit), but this was the best I could manage. And though it breaks all kinds of textbook rules, I still feel there is something that works here. Maybe it’s just the charm of this kid, his big smile and cheekiness of jumping in front of my lens.

Back from Kashmir: A Bit of Travelogue with Photographs

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India, Kashmir

Village Shop, Aru, Jammu & Kashmir.

I’m back in New Delhi after a short trip up north to the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Jammu & Kashmir is India’s most northern state, which borders with Pakistan (west), China (north) and Tibet (east). Except for Ladakh, which is the Buddhist part in the east of Jammu & Kashmir, the state is not a common tourist destination for Westerners, although Hindus from the rest of India do travel here for pilgrimages (most importantly the Armanath Yatra). Indeed, because of dispute over part of the territory of the state with Pakistan, many governments advise “against all travel to rural areas of Jammu and Kashmir other than Ladakh; all travel in the immediate vicinity of the border with Pakistan, other than Wagah; and all travel in Manipur” and “all but essential travel to Srinagar and Imphal” (in the words of the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office).¹

An Ode to Film Photography

… or a lament?

From a project for a course I took on Gothic Literature in North America at the University of Costa Rica. The original photograph was a self-portrait taken in the Netherlands, but in this print I completely ‘burned’ away everything except a sliver of the face to create a ghostly (uncanny?) image. I also considered adding a mirror image of the face, but never got to it – it’s technically quite involved (but not impossible) to do that in the darkroom.