Categories
CHINA Photography

Have you found your art?~

Is there something that allows you to live life more passionately? Do you find yourself doing something regularly that you cannot not do and it makes time as you know it stretch, fly by or completely come to a halt? Is there a place inside your world that only you hold the key to? Because only when you find your art do you truly know real passion. Don’t you love watching a musician lost inside their music, a dancer moving as if in a trance or a cook absolutely absorbed in what they are creating?

Inside of that magical world of real art there is little room for boredom, lethargy, competition or ego. Inspiration, satisfaction, happiness and the right kind of struggle seem to resonate with it.

That is the world I want to live in if I can be so lucky.

Image of a young boy who loved music and created a self made instrument of wood and string. I met him in 2011 in the old beautiful city of Kashgar, in Xinjiang, China

Categories
human rights Photography

Them too~

The amazing speech of Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globe awards is still resonating in me today with its powerful and poignant attention to the issues that women of the world face today and how it’s more than ever time for a radical change. She caused me to think of all the stories I have heard throughout my life growing up in Lebanon and feeling fury at the roles women and girls were forced to adopt. In some places in the Middle East women can be legally killed if there is any “suspicion” of adulterous behavior. Dead before proven innocence is the way to go.

I am thrilled for the amazing women in the entertainment industry and their #metoo campaigns, but who is fighting for the rights of the forgotten women in places like India, Africa and the Middle East among many others. It’s #themtoo.

I took this image last April in the slums of Delhi where girls hide behind doors and windows and hesitate to shine in the glory they were born into.

Day 8 of 365

Categories
contemplations inspiration life New York Photography street

Day 21~ November 21st~ New York

on the move

We seem to go through our days without ever being aware of the most common fact of life: we are living on a sphere which is zipping in space at a staggering speed of 67000 miles/hour and spinning around its axis simultaneously at a speed of about 1000 miles/hour. And somehow all this is engineered in such a way that we feel no movement at all. The most awe inspiring of life’s mysteries are the simplest ones.

 

Categories
inspiration life Photography story street xinjiang

Day 4~ June 4th~ Xinjiang

the man who wouldn’t stop smiling

The simpler the people the easier it is for them to smile…

Have you noticed how in the so-called civilized and developed countries, you end up praying for the sun to shine to get a half-smile out of people in the street? We have complicated our modern lives so much that we end up dragging ourselves around miserably with the weight of problems that we took on voluntarily. Then you meet people in developing countries whose lives are simple, whose worries, as big as they may be, are straightforward and uncomplicated so they can smile so easily from ear to ear when prompted!

When I met this man in Kashgar and tried to photograph him and talk to him with my conversational chinese and his Uyghur dialect, we just ended up standing there in the middle of midday traffic just grinning at each other like two simpletons 🙂

In me this moment lives as one of life’s precious gifts valued and not to be forgotten.