A Bedoin Boy

[alfredo]

A Bedoin Tribe moved through the area where I lived. I was passing by where they were camped and this boy came out to see me and bum cigarettes. I had no cigarettes, but I did have a nearly new pencil. I gave it to him in trade for a photograph.




Maybe 1968 or 1969 Somewhere between Asmara and Massawa Eritrea.

[Blue_In_AK]

1. Lovely portrait, Alfredo.

You're lucky to have experienced different countries and cultures.

[alfredo]

2. It spoiled me. when I got back to the US

nothing caught my fancy. In Africa I was in photographer heaven. It was a couple decades before I even picked up my camera again for anything other than occasional events.


You can tell he's a hard ass. Of course you never hear of a wussy Bedoin.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. Wussy Bedouin - that's funny...

I know what you mean about photographer heaven. That's why I'm so glad I'm in Alaska, now that I have this newfound interest in photography. What a lucky break, huh? It's almost impossible to take a bad picture here.

[alfredo]

5. I came from a country of Injera and Berebere to

white bread and Velveeta. It was a shock to the system. I didn't want to come back, but it took the intervention of a famous African singer to convince me to get on that plane and to fight for my country from within the belly of the beast.

[RagingInMiami]

8. I can relate somewhat

Having lived in Europe for two years and in Colombia for a year, returning to the U.S. is always weird. We truly live in a separate universe.

Just last month when I was coming back from Havana, after having spent a week talking to all the locals and getting a true sense of what they're going through, I was in the Bahamas airport and they had CNN on an overhead TV.

I stopped to see what was happening and the biggest issue that day was whether or not we need to pass an English-only law. It just went on and on and on about why we need an English-only law. This was the story of the day.

It was just another confirmation as to how out of touch we are with reality in this country.

The fact is, even if the immigrants never learn English because they're too old or they don't have time or whatever, their kids grow up speaking English. Even if the kids speak two languages, they will always prefer English. I've seen it happen thousands of times within thousands of immigrant families throughout the U.S.

Assimilation occurs naturally, even if it sometimes takes a generation. An Engligh-only law will not speed up that process.

[alfredo]

10. That's so true. It is amazing how much time congress spends

on useless bullshit.


It's also amazing how wealthy we are materially but how poverty stricken we are culturally.

[ConsAreLiars]

11. I returned to the US after a over a year way, mostly in/around India,

I didn't do much photography there, just a few amateur snapshots every once in a while until I ran out of film. I had planned to return the way I had come, overland, cheapest class, but got knocked down by (probably) E. Coli Afghani, and after a week or so (time got hazy) of diarrhea and jaundice flew back to the US. An overnight stop in Amsterdam, and my recovery was well underway, but when I landed in NY and took the bus to La Guardia for the next leg, I was absolutely stunned by how gray and dismal the world had become.

It was was worse than surreal. Maybe sub-real. I had been so long in so many places where life just shouted out its presence in every possible color and voice. Thousands of years of cultures that had diversified in every imaginable way and were celebrating beingness in brilliant living color. Jains walking nude, and/or nearly, on a pilgrimage to A 60-foot high statue of a nude saint, a scrum at the bus ticket office where I had to yell out my destination when trying to reach the Buddhist Caves in Ajanta, a drink of rotgut with some turbaned tribals in the region as I walked back to the nearest town, the most delicious meal ever served on a banana palm leaf at the bus stop at Jog Falls, a truly harmonious cacophony of "all" the top Bollywood hits outside a rented room in Bombay, small shrines with flowers and incense on every corner in Varanasi, ... and so on. (Experiences in Europe were similar, in many ways.)

And then returning to a place where the world was made of asphalt, concrete, or steel. Where history began a couple hundred years ago with imperialism and had thereafter continued with imperialism and the suppression of difference, or worse. And where killing "the other" was thought to bring merit.

Over the years I've done this and that to help bring change here, but I suspect by enjoyment of nature photography has at least a little to do with the gut feeling that the diversity of raw nature has the same kind of integrity and truth that I found so severely missing in this "civilization" when I returned from that trip.

[alfredo]

12. You really nailed it. I couldn't eat anything when I got home.

it was so bland. Even the Kenyan version of our hamburger was far superior. A chicken Marsala burger is a thing of beauty.

The people here are guarded, so uptight, so aware of how they fit in. I was so glad for the hippies and other bohemians. They were my lifeline. Like me, they were disaffected by American culture.

[RagingInMiami]

4. Looks like something I would see in National Geographic

What were you doing living in Africa?

[alfredo]

6. I drank a lot of honey wine and smoked local crops.

I also worked for a concern referred to as the "Green NSA."


thanks for the props.


Not sure if I am going to use this one or the ones I posted early last week.

http://homepage.mac.com/alfredo_tomato/Random_Images/PhotoAlbum17.html

I will either play it straight, or throw in something that my wife calls "creepy and disturbing."

[RagingInMiami]

7. If you want votes

Go with the Bedoin Boy. If you want to express something a little untraditional to test the waters of the lounge, then go with one of those photos.

I would choose the first one because the shadow on his face looks as if it is another person. Or is it another person?

[alfredo]

9. Could be. You are talking about up top to the left?

Cute kids will be all over the competition. I'm not really into cute. I can appreciate it, but can't do it. Even the one shot i entered that had two cute kids, there was a a sadness about them. Because they were not in traditional dress, they were outsiders. They were daughters of prostitutes. They will be without support, without husbands. They will be alone. Most likely they died during the famine that hit the region a couple years later. If they survived they could have joing the EPLF* to fight the Ethiopians. I hope that was their future. The EPLF was very good for women. They were treated as equals.


I really don't have much invested in winning. I like taking part in the competition, but winning is not the point for me.

*Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front.