This architectural short film grabbed my attention once I noticed it included the parliament building in Dhaka. I briefly mentioned it in the TEDx post (it includes a link to the video about its history and the life of Nathaniel Kahn, the architect).

This short however starts with some beautiful architectural imagery. It’s filmed in high definition and best viewed full screen. But just when you think that there isn’t that much more to it, it slowly starts to pull you in as a wonderfully strange imaginary world comes to life. One I wouldn’t mind living in to be honest. I was quite impressed by the camera work and first thought it was done with the new range of DSLR’s that support video while offering more depth of field control at affordable prices.

But I was a bit surprised that one would travel all the way to Bangladesh just to film a building. Then I realized the entire movie was created with CGI. Quite impressive as it was all done by one man, Alex Roman, and a lot of time. That it really is all just bits and bytes can be seen here. Real buildings in an unreal world.

Remembering Chittagong, Bangladesh

Some ships meet their fate at the bottom of the ocean. Others continue sailing, long exceeding their expiry date, or are docked as museum pieces for the generations to come. But for most ships, their demise is spelled on the beaches of the poorest nations. In particular: the shorelines of Chittagong, the southernmost province of Bangladesh.

I was reminded of this place when seeing the photographic series of ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ by Edward Burtynsky. He has created fascinating photo essays on how mankind’s industrial hunger has radically altered our landscapes into beautifully disturbing places.  (His website unfortunately doesn’t allow direct links to the ship breaking series, so to get there, pick: works > ships > shipbreaking. His other series are also well worth visiting).

But it was thanks to a recent reunion with a classmate from my Bangladeshi days, that brought back many of my memories from that time.

A School Field Trip

It must have been in ’86 when my class traveled from Dhaka to Chittagong by train. Twenty-three years later, many of the details escape me. I can’t quite remember if this particular trip was supposed to have any educational value, nor whether we ended up in a guesthouse near Chittagong city or Cox Bazar, a place situated on the longest natural beach in the world. But what I do remember is this trip was fun. It was one filled with many firsts for me. For it was here were I was introduced to ‘UNO’. Easy to learn, and playable with many, it’s the one card game I almost always take with me when I travel.

More importantly though – and with a class of pre-adolescent teens whose hormones were starting to kick in – we discovered there was more to the opposite sex than we had been led to believe. And so we took our first clumsy steps in flirting with each other through elaborate paper counting games that would help us predict our future partners. The rules of which are now lost on me, but I’m sure it’s still played today by the upcoming youth. And as if that wasn’t enough, we even went to the trouble of organizing an ad-hoc dance party one night. Missing the proper ingredients to successfully pull such a thing off, such us proper mood lighting, we huddled into a small dark room, where we silently danced, so that we could here a puny sound coming off of the speakers of a small walkman someone had brought along. By all objective metrics, it was a disaster. But that wasn’t the point. When The Eye of the Tiger or Tarzan Boy played, all was good. We were having fun and that all that mattered.

It was also here were I learnt to spin the bottle and play truth or dare. It was even thanks to these very likable games that I was first kissed. Looking back, it was all very innocent of course. But at the same time, very new and exciting as well. It was just a matter of time, but by the end of the trip, the first couple of our class had formed.

A Hike to the Beach

It was during this trip – one late afternoon – that our chaperones took us out on a hike. We trekked over rolling hills covered by lush and green grass. Peering over hills and cliffs, the surrounding views were magnificent. Walking between natures untouched vastness, it was hard not to feel incredibly small and meaningless. It was a humbling experience.
If I have a penchant of traveling to weird and strange places, then this is probably where I got my first taste. For it was on these hills that I discovered the romance of travel. I’ve been pursuing it ever since.

As we walked closer to the coast, the Indian Ocean started to appear along the distant horizon. As we reached a cliff overlooking the shore line, the sun started to set. It was a dreamy and surreal sight to behold. At low tide, we stood before an almost endless and deserted beach. On it laid these two huge and rusty old ships – like fish out of water – and in a stage of decay. They had been brought here to die.

Although the clues were there, it’s not something I could have witnessed during a single sunset. But what happens here is the industrial equivalent of nature at work. The local villagers, using only their bare hands, will – like little creatures – crawl over these gigantic carcasses. As the oil – like blood –spills over and onto the beaches, they are slowly, bit by bit, torn apart, until over a period of weeks and months, nothing of these mighty ships are left.¹

Recycling to Survive

For me, the fact of seeing these ships in a place where they normally wouldn’t belong was amazement enough. If our teachers hadn’t stopped us, we would have probably turned them into a huge playground.

And although I knew they would eventually vanish, little did I realize the scale and endeavor neded to undertake such a job of breaking down a ship. Especially with the little means they had available to them. But then, by then, I had taken for granted that everything in Bangladesh got recycled. This was long before such behavior became fashionable in the west. Of course, this was not done out of any environmental concerns, but pure out of necessity to survive. Like the little children that would daily roam our neighborhood in Dhaka, carrying jute bags and filling them with any litter they could find. What ever they found would then be sold off to be recycled. Despite the lack of proper municipal services, our streets were always clean and for many, this was their way of staying alive. Witnessing this from the other side of the divide, I knew early on that I was in a privileged position.

And so upon our return to the guesthouse and sheltered lives, our only worry was organizing a party that night. The only thing we had to concern ourselves with was being the children we were, trying hard to grow up in a place where ships were sent to die.

¹) In Lord of War – a film about an opportunistic weapons dealer fueling the fires of war– a similar scene is depicted. Only here, we’re in Africa where an airplane is being dismantled overnight by the locals.

This music video uses a technique called tilt shift photography. Tilt shift lenses are – as the name indicates – able to be tilted and shifted relative to the camera sensor. These special lenses are mostly used in architectural photography where images taken with a normal lens tend to suffer from heavy perspective distortion. Lines that should appear parallel from each other start to converge to a single point instead. But by using tilt shift lenses, photographers can ‘bend’ light in a controlled manner, neutralizing the effects of the perspective distortion, and thus making lines look straight again.

But by overdoing this technique, one can achieve the effect of turning real world scenes into toy like looking models. The shallow depth of field and over saturated colors enforce this idea. It’s the complete opposite of what Hollywood films tend to do: film small models and then make them appear larger than life. Either way, it gives us a completely different look on our world.

Keith Loutit, photographer in question has also made other such video’s such as North Wind Blew South.

View Cameras

Tilt shift photography originated from the accordion like view cameras. Because the photographic plate was only connected to the lens plate by a accordion folded bellow, both plates could be moved independently from each other, letting the photographer distort his image anyway he wanted. These cameras however are mostly only still used by die hard photographers for landscape and studio photography as they quite large, heavy and unwieldy to use.

And for those interested, Canon has just released a new 24mm tilt shift lens for their EOS DSLR line up. It’s a lot more versatile then their previous version and a lot easier to carry around than a view camera.

First Powered Flight at Kitty Hawk
Date: December 17th, 1903
Place: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
Photographer: John T. Daniels

The Shooting of a Loyalist Militiaman
Spanish civil war: Federico Borrell García, was shot to death the instant this photograph was taken.

Date: September 5, 1936
Place: Cordoba Front, Spain
Photographer: Robert Capa

Hindenburg Disaster
Date: May 6, 1937
Place: Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey
Photographer: Sam Shere

Mounting the Soviet Flag over the Reichstag
Date: May 2, 1945
Place: Berlin, Germany
Photographer: Yevgeny Khaldei

Celebrating the end of WWII: Kiss at Time Square
After you’ve had a big fight, you make up with a kiss.

Date: August 14, 1945
Place: Manhattan, New York City
Photographer: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Hiroshima Aftermath
Date: September 7, 1945
Place: Hiroshima, Japan
Photographer: Stanley Troutman

The Most Beautiful Suicide
Evelyn McHale threw herself from the observation deck of the Empire State Building and died immediately upon landing on a car down below. Before she jumped, she left behind a note: ‘He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,’

Date: May 1, 1947
Place: Manhattan, New York City
Photographer: Robert Wiles

Segregated Water Fountains
Date: 1950
Place: North Carolina
Photographer: Elliott Erwitt

Atomic Explosion Split Nanoseconds after Detonation
Nuclear test site: Because the explosions happened so fast, special ‘rapatronic’ cameras were built to capture the blast immediately after detonation. The last image is from a video to measure the damage done by a blast in an urban setting.

Date: Spring, 1956
Place: Nevada
Photographer: Harold Edgerton

Hans Conrad Shuman Leaping to the West
Date: August 15, 1961
Place: Berlin, Germany
Photographer: Peter Leibing

Monk Sets Himself on Fire
A Buddhist monk protesting the poor reforms of the South Vietnam government of the time, poured gazoline over his body and then set himself on fire.

Date: June 10, 1963
Place: Saigon, South Vietnam
Photographer: Malcolm Browne

Police Chief Executes a Viet Cong Captain
During the Tet Offensive, Viet Cong captain Nguyễn Văn Lém was captured after targeting the families of South Vietnam’s police officers. South Vietnam’s national police chief  Nguyen Ngoc Loan was caught on film the moment he executed Lém personally.

Date: February 1, 1968
Place: Saigon, South Vietnam
Photographer: Eddie Adams

‘Too Hot! Too Hot!’
The words Phan Thị Kim Phúc screamed as she fled a village that had just been destroyed by a napalm bomb.

Date: June 8, 1972
Place: Trang Bang, South Vietnam
Photographer: Nick Út

Fall of Saigon
Americans and Vietnam citizens who had been loyal to the US were airlifted out of Saigon as the Viet Cong approached the city. This was taken at the US embassy as people scrambled to the roof in the hopes of catching a helicopter out.

Date: April 29, 1975
Place: Saigon, South Vietnam
Photographer: Hubert van Es

Challenger Disaster
This would be the first mission a teacher would go up into space and as such got a lot of attention at school before the Challenger was launched. It was a shock when we say it go up in flames.

Date: January 28, 1986
Place: Cape Canaveral, Florida
Photographer: Unknown

Man Holds off Tanks
This is probably one of the most powerful images of a single man trying to make a difference.

Date: June 5, 1989
Place: Near Tiananmen Square in Bejing, China
Photographer: Jeff Widener

United Colors of Benetton
This photo is the odd one out, it being an advertisement for Benetton, but it defied all rules at the time by carrying a political message instead of just selling clothes. This was one of the first ones in a series of advertisements that tried to break taboos.

Date: 1989
Place: Italy
Photographer: Oliviero Toscani

Highway of Death
Iraqi soldier scorched to death when an escaping convoy was obliviated by attacking US planes. Until then, the first Gulf War had been portrayed as an almost clinical operation with precision bombings and surgical strikes. It was only in the aftermath of the war that another image started to appear.

Date: March, 1991
Place: Kuwait
Photographer: Kenneth Jarecke.

Falling Man
During the 9/11 attacks, many of those on the top floors of the twin towers were trapped. Trying to escape from the heat, many of them had no choice but to jump.

Date: September 11, 2001
Place: Manhattan, New York City
Photographer: Richard Drew

Mourning a relative after the Tsunami
Date: December 28, 2004
Place: Cuddalore, India
Photographer: Arko Datta

After the Bombs have Fallen
One of the strangest pictures here depicting that our times have changed. We’re using to seeing the after math of war as one of suffering and pain. Not of young hipsters driving around driving around tricked out cars and taking pictures of the damage with their mobiles.

Date: August 15, 2006
Place: South Beirut, Lebanon
Photographer: Spencer Platt

Rebel Leader Laurent Nkunda
Date: 2007
Place: Kichanga, Democratic Republic of Congo
Photographer: Cédric Gerbehaye

It was 1985. We were flying back from Belgium to Bangladesh and had to spend a night in Bombay in order to make our connecting flight the next day. We arrived after dark and were whisked off to a hotel that attempted to convey a sense of high establishment. But in fact, it was suffering from the high humidity in the air. Living in the tropics, carpeted floors were a luxury and it was here where I could see firsthand why. As we walked through the hallways towards our rooms, I witnessed how water dripped from the ceilings down on to the damp hallway carpets. And anything damp in this climate starts to rot. I’ve slept in far worse places since then, but at the time, I was glad we were only staying a single night.
We would return to the airport the very next morning. The sun was up and it was on our way there that I saw Bombay as it really was for the first time. Even though at that point, we had lived in Dhaka for two years, that short ride was sufficient to give me one of the worst culture shocks of my life. The amount of poverty I saw out on those streets was indescribable.

Slumdog Millionaire takes place in this very same city. Nowadays, it is called Mumbai. The story itself is told in an unconventional yet refreshing way. At first, I thought there really wasn’t a story but simply an account of what it was like growing up in the slums of Bombay. Sort of like watching a travel documentary of a place that otherwise would remain completely alien to us. The cinematography is wonderfully beautiful even though the scenes it depicts aren’t. We are shown the poverty and pollution inside the amazing network of a large slum city. It’s the Bombay I remember driving though as a child.
The film shifts gear half way through, and slowly but surely, an innocent love story starts to emerge between two of the slum dwellers. As they struggle to stay together, it’s the harsh reality of their situation that keeps getting in their way.
While this film reminds me a lot of another excellent movie: Cidade de Deus (City of God), it’s comes over as a more optimistic film despite the environment in which it takes place. Well worth seeing.

The Places We Live

Sticking to the same subject. Here is an interesting site that documents 16 people around the world talking about their homes inside these slum cities and their lives. Also in sort of the same vein are the photographs of Michael Wolf. While technically they’re not slums, he went out to photograph 100 people in their apartments in Honk Kong. The apartments are all pretty much the same, just small boxes. But each one is personalized telling us something about the lives of its inhabitants.

My travel itinerary

I’ve just exported my facebook photo’s from my previous travels to this site. So for those of you who don’t wish to have a facebook account, feel free to view them over here.

The latest photo’s are from my last trip to Malawi. I spent the first week in Machinjiri with my family. After that, I traveled north.