After a few half-hearted years of being on Facebook, I decided to kill my involvement with it once and for all.
I think there are certain misconceptions about what we have begun to call social media, in spite of it being accepted common sense these days that you have to be engaging through it to expand your audience.
Sometimes you come across stories in the unlikeliest of places, even in a concrete bunker-like structure tucked within plantations surrounded by dusty outer-city streets. Ages ago, before the city spilt over it, there used to be a valley that filled with the occasional flood here, on its way to the sea a few curves ahead. And there’d be enough groundwater to sustain a village called Lawami, a village named after the valley, between a few scraggly farms and the sea. And now the valley is somewhere under the concrete, the village part of a neighborhood that no one knows, and the sheikh has nothing to do except talk of the old days, weighed down by a massive watch of fake gold.
That story is here.
Khor Fardh is an example of a story where each shot I took was lousy. The contrast was awful: blinding white off Hilal’s dishdasha and pitch black off his sunburnt skin. The only way out of this was getting really close till his face filled a large part of the frame, like the shot used in the story here. I was still using multiple lenses in those days so I swapped the 35 for the 50. But, good light or bad, I was just plain uninspired and out of ideas, stuck between Khor al Fardh and the sea.
Monika Gubler lives alone in a little apartment in Basel, Switzerland, with a sprinkling of angels in every room: on the shelves, on the walls, hanging, propped up, realistic, cartoonish, romantic, in paper and clay and metal and glass. Over her white Bose speakers. Opposite the neighbor’s door that has a sticker that says the flat is protected with a handgun. In front of the lace curtains of her little balcony, where she looks over the narrow one-way street and to the attic studio with the bald man who doesn’t say hello. It is a modern flat except for the massive wood cupboards that used to be her parents’, and the angels, whom she insists are ageless.
Narrated by Johanna Schwegler. Photo by Ingeborg Schwegler
“There was a hill with a monastery on top close to my house in Wattwil, and I learnt to ski on its slopes. My mother, who was a very good skier, taught me. School ended at 4pm and I’d train after, until it got dark.
“My mother took me to the main ski slopes 5km away on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. When we came home my father always made chicken on the grill. He was a good cook, and we were very hungry after skiing. He always used a lot of spices: a lot of paprika and mustard and… he was very creative. We had a portable orange rotisserie that we’d have on the table. This was our traditional Sunday dinner. I loved the skin grilled crisp.
by Pinaki
It is summer, but it’s 14ºC at 8pm and we are eating beef mince and onions and tomatoes laid over beds of hollowed-out courgettes, and salad known only as a cutting salad because you can keep cutting its leaves off for months as you grow it. And gewurztraminer. By this time the entire village of Termes is silent and will soon go to sleep. Only the swallows are moving, the hirondelle, and they’re flying high and that means the good weather will hold. Ten degrees at night is good weather if the days warm up again.
Narrated by Sonja Nebel
“One of the nicest memories I have is of my grandfather and me flying kites in early September over the flatlands near Hannover, around our little village of Abbensen. This was just after the grain was harvested, with the stubs of the grass and the wind kicking up as it always does in early Autumn.
Narrated by Nancy Papathanasopoulou. Photographed by Kostas Papathanasopoulos
“I was born in Athens but the sea defined my first steps: I swam before walking.
“When I was a baby, my father left me floating in the sea out of curiosity to see if I’d sink or float. I floated and started swimming. I walked two months later, at the age of one year exactly, to the day.
Narrated by Valentina Mustafa and Aseya Ahmed
Valentina Petrovna Shveda is in Kagarlik, 70km from Kiev, a few years old and wedged between her parents, posing for a portrait. And now she sits with me over smetana and sour cherries and talks of what happened next: the childhood of travel, moving every five or six years with her parents as they taught Russian and Ukrainian, and then, grown up, working in a bookshop in Kiev when the Bahraini she would marry walked in, looking for books on art. “Bahrain? I didn’t even know of it. It was a little dot on a big map.” But she left when she got her papers, left with Aseya, then 3 years old, to a Bahraini family of Bastakis who traced their ancestry to Bastak in what is now Iran. They spoke Persian at home, and Arabic outside; Valentina could barely speak English. “Telephone calls were very, very expensive. We wrote letters once a month and that was our relief for homesickness.”
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