¢ Mélanie Giard
One of my dearest images of my project in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, made it in wall-size into the water council meeting in Marseille. Besides the natural photographer’s pride the fact made me smile, that this image was created with a (nowadays meagre) Minolta 7D on a 6Mpix sensor. Now imagine how large the newest and best Nikon’s files would allow to be blown up…
When visiting one of the rainwater harvesting project sites, questions came up of how to supply those parcels with water, where there is only a hut with a thatched roof – in these places usually the most needy people live. After some discussion back and forth an archaic solution was brought up and displayed in a similarly archaic way: by drawing it with a stick in the sand.
On another topic: Tyler Monson has given me notice about a glitch in the post “More Things Green”: green the image was indeed, too green. I’ll correct this. Thanks, Tyler!
This image might make a nice complement for “Tidiness”, here, albeit not as clear in its meaning.
Approaching Lady Manning Bridge, built by the British in common wealthy colonial times to connect Batticaloa town with Kallady, one has to pass a number of military checkposts, indicated by the camouflage tin sheets. Fortunately enough the lady’s back provided a shield for my camera which would have otherwise drawn unnecessary attention from the soldiers onto it. My friend had to learn this the hard way in Colombo, when security staff on the boardwalk outside of the American Embassy’s wall noticed him looking through the viewfinder… We were happy that they were content to get a photocopy of his passport.
of the road. The president, then freshly re-inaugurated? Would Sri Lanka be a Muslim state, he probably would have to fear for his accumulated riches.
No words friday – comments still enabled, Thomas 
Around noon, when students leave school and usually are not too hard pressed to arrive at home, a foreigner with a big camera is a welcome event that usually leads to a lot of grimaces and giggling and curious chimping about the outcome of the picture-taking activities.
This is the just finished assembly hall in the small town of Oddaimavadi in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, about 20km north of Batticaloa. As this is a mainly Muslim village, the hall but also the superiors’ offices are painted and decorated green. Immediately the german translation of Liza’s lesson in ‘My Fair Lady’ came to my mind: In German, instead of ‘The Rain In Spain’ she has to rehearse ‘Es grünt so grün’, meaning ‘it greens so green’. Colorwise it’s almost overkill.
Sometimes the differing nuances are already in the captured frame, so here again I needed only minimal adjusting in bibble5.
An image that I felt a spontaneous affection for when reviewing. And for me it fell exactly in the frame, no corner or side that I’d like to crop away.
Another variety of a food stall in one of the Batticaloa side roads. Even shops that don’t sell alcohol try to put up fencings and grates to protect their goods.
Found on Batticaloa Main Street, a place where at the moment the rainwater has flooded many shops. Have a look here at a BBC image collection. The number of refugees in makeshift camps meanwhile exceeds 320.000. But as both the number of TV cameras and the economic value are low, the world doesn’t even have a look.
5 years after Tsunami, the beach promenade of Batticaloa is all new and shiny. The only thing lacking are the tourists, who come only in smallest numbers, as infrastructure is still limited.
Update: As my hoster has copied this blog to a new machine with a different IP, som inconsistencies in posts and comments can happen. Withing maximum one week all changes in the DNS should have been propagated, until then I will try to keep the blogs in sync.
if such a playground is here in the right place. At least my kids would probably prefer to climb on trees, wade in creeks, run through the fields, play hide and seek in the bushes.
But taking into account that this area was probably only recently de-mined, it makes perfect sense. Don’t worry, profits in mine production were and are high, and supporting humanitarian organisations is a wonderful activity to deflect from the moneymaking and warfaring – on all sides.
Rural Reality in the village of Periyapullumalai, Sri Lanka, quite far away from our (made in China) style of life.
Wordless Friday, okay?
It was only when the boys got distracted by viewing the images on the screen of my friend’s camera, that the little girl, easily the youngest of the group, was allowed to pose for the camera.
Found in Batticaloa downtown. Sometimes all the shapes seem to fall right into place.
![Beach Assembly [f/8, 1/80 sec, 35mm-e, ISO 200, Sony A700]](http://markus-spring.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/dsc44498_v2bb.jpg "Click to enlarge: Beach Assembly [f/8, 1/80 sec, 35mm-e, ISO 200, Sony A700]")
Sometimes, like here, the horizon has to be in the middle. And, another deviation from standard rules, only the lower half of the brightness scale was used. While the latter might need some modification for printing, viewed on a computer screen it seems just right.
Oh yes, and these fisherman are a recurring theme for me. Every image is different, so I never got bored visiting them early morning on the beach.
Oh yes, and as bigger is better, at least when viewing photographs on a screen, just click on the image to see it larger.
The end of the civil war in May 2009 not only brought a drastic increase of security and freedom to move in the streets for the people of Batticaloa, but also, only one year later, a largely disproportionate number of new banks as well as investment companies trying to make their luck in this up to then forgotten region of Sri Lanka. I can only hope that the land owners are wary enough and check the oh so clever proposals. And just have a look to the 1:1 crop (when clicked on) of the main image: No shoes, paddles, and kids that help to earn the family income. That is more the normality of life on the east coast.
The Neccder billboard to the right, admonishing to protect the wetlands, is just a nice descant, a reminder of yesteryear.
Sometimes a scenery like this flies by, and I am glad that my feelings made me frame and record this scenery as it presented itself. Something in me just said “this works”.
Jewelry business was not flourishing too much during the civil war – not only due to the lack of money, but also because the Tamil Liberation Army had forbidden the dowry system. The dowry system was and is very problematic for the status of women in the society: The necessity to provide a huge dowry often makes baby girls less welcome. And as a better education makes a young woman suitable for grooms with an equal status, additionally to the costs of the education the expenses for an even higher dowry have to be taken into account.
I was not astonished when Tamil friends admitted, that “this was one good thing” the LTTE had tried to introduce.
One of our pumps, built during the last project, was not correctly fixed with some kind of anchors in the sand. It still provides clean water, but is now uncomfortably low for usage. The lady however was still glad to have it, as carrying water cans is impossible for her.
Found in one of the side streets of Batticaloa. In contrast to the blue sky of this image, taken in November last year, Batticaloa and surroundings suffered from torrential rainfalls, cutting off traffic and transports and forcing tenthousands to leave their homes, and many to stay in provisional shelters. Since some days only the situation has improved, and now the damage gets calculated. I hope to receive some images of the situation within the next days.
The American Dream is somewhat faded, but still alive here in Batticaloa.
Some things, it seems, haven’t changed since the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the stationmaster’s bell among them.
Sometimes the Hindu shrines are very inconspicuous, like this one. The only signs of reverence are the white blossoms, better visible after clicking on the 1:1 crop to the right.
The winter monsoon time also provided some dry hours with a clean, deep blue sky, creating an image impression that reminded me very much of scenes photographed in the U.S., getting the best, deeply saturated colors out of Kodachrome, then often at the expense of the shadow areas.
At least the ads for Kodachrome are still intact in Batticaloa, unfortunately I had no opportunity to ask when they sold their last roll of it.
The Online Photographer today’s post dealt with the different “sweet spots” of the cameras. The image of the dead gecko certainly profited from a broader sweet spot of the camera used: Not wanting to destroy the nuances with a flash, high ISO as well as image stabilisation was necessary due to the unavailability of a tripod.
The result I think is convincing, enough detail becomes visible when you click on the 1:1 crop to the right. The ants of course show motion blur, but the image is not meant as a documentary, and so this in my eyes adds to the message.
As near the equator the length of the days is approx. 12 hours during the whole year, at least part of the business life in Sri Lanka have to happen during the dark hours. Since the end of the civil war it is possible again to go out shopping in the evening, something that was either too dangerous or even forbidden for long periods of time.
Found in Koduvamadu. You can find it here on google maps. Yes, it’s probably in the middle of nowhere. The amount of attention as well as improvements might be proportional to the geographical situation.
Continuing yesterday’s fences with a door.
After Friday’s tragic post it was hard for me to find an adequate topic for today.
The fences in Sri Lanka are continously fascinating me (therefore there’s already a gallery of them), and this last visit I found not only those dangerously looking fencepost-tops, made from palmyrah stalks, but also a young palmyrah plant, showcasing this perfect star-shaped leaf, which’s caulis later can be used for the fencing.
And as always – click on the images to see them much larger! This should work throughout the whole blog and also the galleries.
Again found in Batticaloa. Networking and Operating System support is really competent, and a broad range of software is available, too.
Found in one of the main roads of Batticaloa
Well, on New Year’s Evening, a widely thrown out net could be a suitable starting point for a long, personal reflection about the coming year. And with that image I wish all of you, around the world, a Happy and Healthy New Year!
Not really christmassy, this year’s december wallpaper shows monsoon clouds over the beach of the Bay of Bengal. But then, it is tightly connected with christmas, as the houses in the area were given to the victims to the tsunami of Dec. 26th, 2004.
In this resettlement area of Thiraimadu, Batticaloa, funds of the City of Munich were used to give houses to 42 women headed families that hat lost family members and posessions in the Tsunami. It was a joy to learn that those families do well, and especially that they care very much for the education of their children, even if the available funds for daily life are minimal. At least for them the terror of the tsunami was to a small bit compensated by the donations of Munich’s citizens.
It was not raining when I took these images in one of the fish markets of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Unfortunately now it is – just natural, it’s monsoon time – and even more unfortunately is that my room has so many leakages in the ceiling that I barely know how to position my bed to find a dry place to sleep. The moskito net is unusable due to its position, the luggage already closed so that I can leave the room reasonable quickly if the situation deteriorates.
Since quite some time I had planned to revisit older images. Yesterday’s train delay, that made me spend a very uncomfortable time in an even more uncomfortable train station at night, finally gave me the opportunity to do this. Besides some tagging in bibble5 (which is not yet as comfortable as I’d wish it to be), I drew out the images for the new gallery “Batticaloa Fences”, which you find here.
And while going through them, I again felt my affection for the place and the images, still strong after the year+ that has passed since then. Regarding the photographs it is based on the strong graphics and textures that some of them have, but also on the content, the situation you must live in to protect your property with flattened oil barrels or fragments of asbestos sheets .
finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.
the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 – the preview 2.1a really rocks – and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it’s high time for doing the final selection.
some people are not born poor, but made poor. the idps that now live in navallady, batticaloa, in the former tsunami buffer zone (no permanent house should have been there, the former residents were all resettled) had their homes in the trincomalee district. the civil war came, they were driven out of their houses in the combat- or security zone and now live under most primitive conditions in sheds made of tarpaulins, corrugated tin sheets and leaves. you count the toothbrushes? 8 people live here, in a hut maybe 3,5×5 m².
and i learned a lot about gender budgeting, too (it pays to travel with the boss, who is a psychiatrist by education): if there is a male head of family, there will be: a mobile phone, a tv set (to watch cricket), a small motobike…
but the number of male-headed families is small. the usual story reads more like “lost husband in the conflict, lost the son, fleeing, now living with the small kids here until knowbody knows when, little support, fear, discrimination (by army/police)”. I spare you the details. It is simply incredible.
taking up the topic of my recent post “eyes”, just a bullet list of what it means to be poor in batticaloa, sri lanka (but feel free to put in any other place):
by careful usage of funds, our project could increase the number of donated toilets, and some families in puthur, batticaloa, now have decent hygienic facilities. to help them to help themselves, the beneficiaries were paid in installments and themselves contracted the work. this also created a good sense of ownership – and kept the costs really low. and the toilet now is the most solid structure on the plot, much better then the house…
fortunately enough, un-habitat’s programme “cities without slums” will tackle this situation in order to achieve a structural improvement.
sometimes when the eyes open, gestalt reveals itself. though i am sweating for many of my pictures, on quite some occasions i just recognize, see. and sometimes, i also like the framing and don’t feel the necessity to crop or modify otherwise. rare moments that i really cherish.
no words at the moment – time presses. i hope the picture speaks for itself
photographing in exotic locations usually means meeting people only once in a lifetime. photographing the not-so-well-off means that you even can’t just send a picture or two as email, and even when they write down their address – in the present case i couldn’t read it as i don’t know tamil.
but in this case i was happy: i had the opportunity to meet the fisherman of this post again and present them a print of the photo where he was posing 5 seconds for me.
it was a joy for him and for me. of course, some others now also want their portrait taken…
some of our youngest beneficiaries: their families received rainwater harvesting tanks or toilets through our project. we are targeting especially the poor families, among them so many woman headed families, having lost the husband/father in the tsunami or the war.
the stories you get to hear there are sad, sometimes hard to bear: one woman had lost her husband in the tsunami and 18 months later her son under unknown circumstances due to the war. the death toll of that conflict is now well over 70.000, and besides an end of the fighting on the battlefield no reconciliation is in sight, instead acts of violence and vengeance may deepen the trench between the ethnics. politics has messed up completely here, the reasons you can easily find on both sides.
since my first official visit to batticaloa and kalmunai, fishermen were the subject of numerous shots, from beach overviews up to portraits, details of their catch and their tools. this time i brought two small albums as tokens of my gratitude for their acceptance of my photography.
trying to find the essence of the pictures, i am reviewing the raw files several times, judging back and forth which picture to pick and which to reject, also modifying details here and there.yesterdays posting included the scenery with the two men walking, which i had already posted here. the new version crops out the sky, and i like it much better now as for one thing the sky was a bit too rosy, but also because the lack of sky now gives a stronger impression of a vast and powerful ocean.
catching the small fish, and only small numbers, is hard work, tearing on muscles and gear. the sharp corals brought by the waves to the shore constantly tear holes into the net. a good part of the morning this fisherman spent repairing the net.
he had a helper, and after having tried one spot and repaired the net, off they went along the beach to another spot where the net was thrown again. half a kilo of small fishes after one hour is definitely not sufficient to feed even a single person, so at this time of the year most of the men go to work as labourers.
this is what i am in sri lanka for: bringing locally adapted low cost technology to improve drinking water supply of the people in need, mainly the poor, low caste, incomplete families. the pump you see here consists of material available in the local hardware store, mainly pvc and metal pipes (pvc to avoid corrosion), a glass marble as vent, tire cutouts as gaskets. our partner emas int. has set up a well drilling school to teach this technology. self-employment at least for some is the way to improve their living conditions, others simply profit from the fail-safe and long-lasting technology.
early morning, shortly after sunrise at the beach. half a dozen fishermen are there, but due to the rough sea beach fishery is impossible. one of them tries with a hand net, half an hour of work results in a handful of really small fishes of maybe zero market value. i decided to leave but was gestured to stay, to wait for that single one boat they own that can go deep sea fishing because it has an outboard motor. and then it comes and brings home the catch: a sailfish that makes 8 us$/kg at the market.
after shortly posing for me, the men went off to clean the fish, so i guessed. but no – a motobike was waiting, and 50m away from me – too far for my standard zoom – the fisherman takes the rear seat, and with the fish on his shoulder they head for the market. this would have been *the* shot.
one of the rare occasions i could break out of that usual mission cycle of visiting one rainwater harvesting tank or well or toilet after the other, and just take 7 minutes on the road, for a moment concentrating only on shape, graphics structure. not that i would take this monitoring not seriously, it is just that my attention is suddenly grabbed by some details.
and i had to learn the hard way that procrastinating means loss. i cannot come back there for reasons of time and transport – i do have the position thanks to a small gps logger i always have in my pocket – so i try to snap whatever is interesting immediately and without too much fiddling.
the harvest then only begins after returning home, and fighting the jet lag through staying up until late gives the opportunity to go through the collections. diamonds i rarely find, but even rust can be rewarding.
what you see here are fence blinds, attached to the fence posts to give a little privacy on the 250m² plots, where a big part of the life happens in the garden.
sometimes i am just too shy. the owner of this food stall greeted me, as do most of the people you meet on the early morning streets in batticaloa, but for one reason or the other i refrained from asking if i could make a picture and went into a side street. only after 50m i changed my mind and went back, asked and of course was allowed to photograph (the term shooting is not appropriate in batticaloa as there is too much real shooting happening). and so i got my etude in rusty colors.
my colleage in batticaloa told me this about his life (he’s only 37). roughly 30 years this conflict between ltte and the sinhalese majority now scars the life, public as well as private. when he was 17 he had to flee his village, living 3 months in the jungle, because his life was in danger both from government and ltte – a potential terrorist or a forced recruit don’t face a really high expectancy of life.
so you can only speculate what life awaits those boys.
i stand corrected. while my blog entry had claimed that 4 had been killed by a bomb explosion in batticaloa, it were in fact two, a bystanding riksha driver one of them. it doesn’t make the act less atrocious, to be explained only through a completele contorted logic inherent to terrorism. terrorism has been means of fight of the ‘liberation tigers of tamil eelam’, ltte, for decades. the war they fought stemmed from the deliberate discrimination of their ethnic minority. this fact however is no justification for acts of terror.
it is only that especially the present sri lanka government, at the moment winning the war against the ltte on the battlefield, has no plan for piece, no idea of how to reconcile the minorities in the country. instead it relies on war aggrandizing propaganda, whilst big parts of the country submerge under acts of violence, corruption, vengeance.
the acts of torture reported to me are utterly barbarous, similarly the behaviour of the gangs of the former war lords who are now in regional politics. the principle of legal certainty is widely absent in this country, instead abductions, the usage of masked squealers, violence against members of the press are present in everyday life. this is the country that many people chose to go to for holidays.
Update: Thomas in his comment was kind enough to avoid any mentioning of photographic merits of the pictures shown. And there are simply none. they are simple snaps of what presented itself to the eye, the first even taken inside the car through the windshield. getting out and taking the picture in presence of the police posts nearby was regarded as too dangerous. in sri lanka you can get arrested for less, and even if the danger for a foreigner is probably smal, my local colleagues have to fear at least questioning, getting into the files of the government and its organs for suspicious behavior. and you can vanish for less there.
two more from the beach. the waves are so high at the moment that the traditional paddled outrigger fishery from the beach has to pause. no fishery means no income, so some of the men take their hand net and throw it from the shore. catch is low however.
the day i met them they merely got two handful of fish in the morning, definitely not sufficient to nourish a family. poverty in the city is often combining an acceptable income with bad living conditions, but here in the villages the lack of incomes is what hurts the people the most, and this is the situation where sometimes the children have to add to the family income instead of attending school.
i am on my way again, back to colombo. if things go well we’ll have a stopover in sigiriya, which i think i well deserve after 7 full days of working/traveling/working. this bicycle i discovered on the beach in batticaloa. it would be never considered roadworthy in europe, but here is an undisputed means of transport for man and loads.
those traces i discovered on the beach recently – rarely have seen such a strict evidence of encounter and afterwards going it’s way.
peaceful, isn’t it? unfortunately the morning wasn’t. a claymore mine exploded next to the police station in batticaloa, killed 4 and injured a dozen, 4 school students among them. on the beach we only heard a muted ‘booff’. what a discrepancy between those sceneries.
Update: just replaced the lead image with a lightzone version. the much i like bibble for its speed, lightzone is incredible in its possibility to enhance low contrast structures. even in the thumbnail you can easily spot the difference.
this is why am here. it is good to know that the support we try to bring really reaches the people in need. and when content meets form, out of beauty happiness can rise. sorry for being pathetic, this is an unstaged shot right out of today morning’s site visit, and maybe the jet lag also has its effect.
ok, kids pics always go to the heart, but i can’t help to like it. we can talk about the lighting situation, backlight/striplight in both situations, reduced color sets also which almost leave out a part of the spectrum, so a lot of my ingredients for a good picture are there.
i had planned to post this before leaving to nanjing, china, for the world urban forum. but as quite so often the workload plus time for the kids and my wife consumed all reserves i had calculated and now i am in nanjing, after 28 hours traveling. so for today be it this shot, it has a good relationship with traveling.
before the winter monsoon rains start, the usual catch for the outrigger boats is small. bigger boats with outboard motors then are the only ones that bring home what they catch by long lines.
even then the catch is small. only 5 small thunas for one early morning of fishing is barely sufficient, given that you have to pay the high fuel price also.
the images were converted in bibble – on the laptop this is a good choice because of the more effective cpu usage than with lightzone – and slightly desaturated to work out the silver color of the fish.
finding a time to go for a photowalk to the beach at sunrise was difficult during the last mission – jet lag, early appointments, changes of the venue and so on. in the end, i had to take the last morning – and ended up without visible sunrise due to the clouds.
not wanting to return without any picture, i overcame my shyness and asked the fishermen by gesture if they would allow me to take their pictures. and indeed this was not a problem, but the display of the camera broke the ice and we all had fun time.
so what did i learn from this morning: procrastination is not necessarily evil, but will demand more flexibility. to overcome shyness is not that difficult but also a question of self-esteem. having decided to bring an album with the portraits for my next visit makes the whole thing a much less one-sided affair.
out of our project work: our ngo partner emas, which has 25 years of experience in running well drilling schools in bolivia, has created an awareness programme for students in batticaloa about ways to improve drinking water quality by simple means, among them solar desinfection. trainers went to more than 40 schools with 2000+ students.
the non-availability of clean drinking water clearly is one indicator of poverty. in this area of batticaloa, sri lanka, the soil does not provide drinking water from wells through the whole year. as the next permanent well is 5 km away, the typical wedding present for a couple residing in this area consists of a bicycle and a set of water cans.
through European Union funded project activities, ferrocement rainwater harvesting tanks now will complement the traditional dug wells and alleviate the household chores, freeing valuable time especially for the women.
martin doonan posted some days ago about blog action day and this years topic of global poverty. as poverty is what i am constantly confronted with when on mission in sri lanka – and what guides my actions, too – i gladly took up his reminder and registered. so you will see in the following days many pictures around this matter.
those fishermen in batticaloa i visit regularly since 2005, just see here, here or here. many of those lost relatives and all their belongings in 2004′s tsunami. the curve of their net and their silhouettes are an ongoing fascination for me
the man in this portrait is actually a beneficiary of our project, and i hope to get more details about him soon. up to then take this as an expressive face with trails of deepest injuries.
less words this time. punctum – i have decided to get barthes’ book to understand better what he tries to express.
above you have the black and white version of the batticaloa lighthouse picture. in my eyes it has a more detached quality than the color version here which is just so …natural and vivid. maybe it’s my mood that i savour more in the black and white version.
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what a boost for my ego: last monday the ‘sueddeutsche zeitung’ (1.35 mio readers) has printed the picture above together with a report about the results of munich’s activities in eastern sri lanka.
[edit:]regarding the ego: of course the whole project is a gratification per se: being able to dedicate your energy to the improvement of the life circumstances of victims of such a large scale disaster is a value by itself. it’s only that i am not always an ideal selfless person-
therefore you will understand my disappointment about the fact that my authorship wasn’t mentioned… well, joy and sorrow always take turns.
giving the pictures on the todo-list more attention – for lack of new convincing shots, that is – i found this one again and after in-depth inspection i am astonished again about the fine rendering of colors and details at iso 1600. This is really a great achievement and well worth last years investment in a new camera body. and in this context the new nikon d700 with its suspected low noise at high iso is really attractive. poor me who has invested quite some money in sony mount lenses… sony unfortunately seems to go the ‘more megapixel’ way which will definitely not make me buy a new camera body, and if it’s only for the reason that all my postprocessing can just handle the present 12 million pixels per picture and will slow down to unusability with the 24 million pixels the new sony will offer.
acknowledging the fact that 99% of the views on my images come through the internet at resolutions of ~ 1 million pixels, and for the rare prints and exhibitions the resolution of my camera’s sensor is sufficient, just more megapixels is simply not attractive at all. ’nuff said.
if there is a single one photographic situation that i do like most, it’s backlight in all its variations. it gives so much opportunity for drama, for hiding distracting things, for abstracting from a world full of diverting colors into the essence of shapes and silhouettes. in the picture above as well as in the prior “kalmunai fishermen” the beauty of form is intensified.
in grey past a.k.a. my film days, backlight was always difficult, specifically when shooting slides. in my experience, dslrs are well suited for backlight especially in situations where you can easily chimp or bracket. and my sony a700 seems to keep a lot of highlight information in its raw files for discovery with a suitable tool, lightzone in my case.
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this image is a mystery to me. i regard it very highly (otherwise i wouldn’t show it), but flickr seems to have a differing opinion, or better no opinion at all of it. all the pictures i put on flickr get views, comments even without promoting them, but this one: not a single view in the three days since it has been uploaded.
so i do hope i can blame it on flickr…
“no damage here after the tsunami”. i was astonished, as this area was flat, not far from the beach, but our companion from the municipal administration repeated it. so i started asking for explanations and after some minutes it turned out: people here had been poor before the tsunami, the loss of their huts didn’t count as damage worth accounting. to make this very clear: our company was not a hard-hearted bureaucrat but quite the contrary, father of two and very emphatic. and he understood my helpless laughter after i had understood his explanation.
and the people living here are still poor – their open pit latrine, barely 10m away from the open well illustrates the whole situation. it was this place together with the reading in the city profile that we decided to dedicate the surplus of the donated money to the building of toilets as a very first and basic item that might help the people to improve the circumstances of living here.
their unbroken sense for beauty, for order in certain places, for harmonic colors sometimes shining through made a great impression on me. my photography there, more documenting, more often than not under pressure of time, was rarely up to these moments so my framing of the top image was poor, much too wide, and cropping turned out to be the only solution to rescue this image.
the east coast of sri lanka is a wonderful place – now that the fighting has stopped for the moment. i spent way too little time there. the co-workers in our post-tsunami project have become friends over the time, and their hospitality ist still overwhelming. due to the workload it was only in the early morning that i could sneak out for an hour trying to take some pictures.
these wooden sustainers on a construction site carry the formwork for a concrete ceiling. the look so fragile compared with the woodwork they use for this purpose here in europe, but wood is an expensive commodity over here (no commercial woods) and, in the end, the mere number make them strong
fishermen at the beach of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Silently they were watching the surface of the sea, but suddenly the started gesticulating and shouting, then discussing the best strategy for a catch with their muscular driven boats.
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