an afternoon thumbing through photographs can resemble a journey around the world.

circumnavigation within a few stretched minutes.

all sights seen.

                 a church in Grytviken, South Georgia. built by Norweigans as a whaling post amidst the South Atlantic seas in 1904, it was a stopover point for Antarctic explorers. Ernest Shackleton is buried here. it remains to this day part of Great Britain- somewhat like The Falkland Islands- although those lie 1,390 miles to the east. no one lives here.

                                         The Day of the Dead, Mexico

                 Hong Kong.                                                                                                                                      

the awful seduction of the order & cleanliness of modernity.

absolute vertical precision. formulae transformed into materials.  

there is perhaps a meditative calmness inherent in the structure of these buildings. a quality which you could claim causes hypnosis, or at the very least passvity of a higher order. the subliminal closing of the mind, the ears, the nose. these buildings barely possess any odour at all.

Oriental Beach, New Zealand (1932)                                                            

                  This man is busy attending a conference in Taiwan (1985). He is from The Netherlands.

Varanasi, India

the oldest city in the world. every Hindu is supposed to be buried here. they are burnt & scattered in the Ganges, a few metres away from people washing themselves & their clothes & cows & motorcycles in the waters of the river. young men are always playing cricket along the riverbanks during the daytime. 

i stayed here 10 years ago. that was in a guesthouse run by a tall skeletal man with no teeth who spent each day lying down in a tiny darkened room continuously breaking into violent fits of coughing. he attempted to appropriate as many of my possessions as he could when i was trying to leave his domain. when the water gushed out from the taps in the rooms it would present itself in a dark brown colour & then perhaps stop altogether for a while.

there were power cuts every night and when this happened all of the shops in the narrow alleyways were lit by oil lamps & candles. 

Seikan Railway Tunnel, Japan