Tag: Recollections
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FINDING CHRISTIAN
PERHENTIAN BESAR – 8 February 1978 Olympus OM-1 on Kodachrome 25. Roll 2. Frames 22 and 23. When you travel alone you are inclined to meet more people … and some of those people become your travel mates. I was hanging out during a Chinese New Year holiday at a guesthouse in a small village […]
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KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH AN ALBINO
BATU FERRINGHI – 20 January 1978 Olympus OM-1 on Kodachrome 64. Roll 1 Frame 14 Every time I hear Roberta Flack sing ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’ I am immediately transported back to Malaysia. Funny how our brains can so strongly associate music with time and geography. I was 19 years old, half a […]
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ALPINE SKINNY DIPPING
NORTH CASCADES, WASHINGTON – July 1980 Olympus OM-2 on Kodachrome I think I invented selfies. I always wanted to have people in my photos but often I was the only human being around … so I became the model. I travelled alone in my younger days so I had no choice. A tripod and a […]
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MY FIRST SLR
SINGAPORE – 12 January 1978 I bought my first SLR camera in Singapore in 1978. I was after an Olympus OM-1, a brilliant manual camera which was smaller than most of the SLRs on the market at the time. So it was perfect to throw in a backpack. At the time Singapore was supposed to […]
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ABOARD THE DELPHIN IN THE AMAZON
While a grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a course on tropical agriculture and studied under the great Amazonia scholar Dr William Deneven. I was mesmerised by his tales of the Amazon. And so was my classmate, Oliver Coomes, who decided to write his PhD dissertation on the riverine peasants – the […]
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MY FATHER ON FATHER’S DAY
I barely knew my father, but the fragments I held—eccentric brilliance, deep-sea dreams, fleeting moments in Alaska—still shape how I think about fatherhood. He lived wildly and inconsistently, burning bridges and chasing ideas. In the end, I was just a lightbulb in a long line of missed connections.
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LONG-TERM GAINS IN THE AMAZON
Reserva Nacional Pacaya-Samiria, Peruvian Amazon – 1989 ‘Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.’ Edward O. Wilson Those of you in my generation growing up in America probably had the same Sunday evening pastime as my family: we would watch the National Geographic specials. I loved that […]
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CLIMB THAT GODDAMN MOUNTAIN
‘Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.’ Jack Kerouac There’s one thing I learned early on while working in a mountainous national park in the Pacific Northwest: never let a little cloud cover deter you from climbing a mountain. […]
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ALONE AT NITINAT
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ Henry David Thoreau, Walden ‘I never found a companion that was […]
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