Now, bear with me as this leads me to a related tangential thought about sleep and dreams. They say that we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep. On Semester At Sea you travel while you sleep (and sometimes a professor will actually talk in your sleep, but that’s a different story). Anyway, 1/3 of a life asleep is a considerable amount of time.  If you live to be 80 years old that’s about 26.6 years of sleep.  And even more interesting  various sources, such as Discover Magazine assert that during the course of a lifetime, the average person spends more than six years dreaming. Six years of dreaming! Let that sink in.

I have a whole other life in my dreams. In my dreams I smoke on a regular basis (I’ve never actually had a cigarette, but in my dreams I will likely perish from lung cancer), I get tragic and regrettable tattoos of Disney characters, I walk miles holding babies, have reindeer in my kitchen, I reprise a recurring role as a German soldier, I’ve swam the entire length of the Mississippi River and I fly. I fly everywhere, taking epic journeys over Latin America and Africa wearing red shoes and a blue dress, swooping low over rooftops and up out of the atmosphere. And in one dream I traveled the whole world on a wrought iron bed only to crash land under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Here are a couple of dream recreations (not trying to win any photoshop awards with these!):

I never know what dreams will come at night, but each one is a gift. Anyway, my rather vague point is, there is something sublime about being able to travel while you sleep, especially over the seas. The seas are like dreams anyway — the way they move, the way that they are implied metaphors for the subconscious. I am not sure exactly where the magic is in this connection between travel, the sea and dreams but I know it is in there somewhere.

The ship, our beloved MV Explorer, is a magical place in that it exists in a dimension all its own. Life is simultaneously accelerated and slowed down here, the sea moves under you, timeless, as you stand still on deck watching, and the world unfolds before you day by day, port by port, in glimpses and bursts, beautiful and horrific, kind and volatile all at once. On the ship there are all levels of travelers — the students, wide-eyed with single word superlatives sailing from their lips, floating skywards like brightly colored novelty filled balloons (their real voices will come later as insight unfolds for many years to come) ; there are those like me, I have done it a few times, the experience has greater depth with each voyage, and I finally know that there is always more to discover, that there will always be unfathomable depths to explore; And then there are the ones who do this for life, the sailors and the truly untethered dreamers, who have an ancient hunger and a thousand sunsets in their eyes, their souls move like the waves, they no longer bring their cameras ashore because their hearts already belong fully to the world and the moment they are in, for better or for worse.

You can go back to the places that you have visited, and you can come back to the ship but you can never return to this moment that is right now — this 3 month span will come to and end with people jostling through the hallways, announcements overhead calling out the decks to disembark. Hugs, and “see you laters!” abound, a bright burst of sunlight as you walk out on deck, swipe out, the ship engine still humming behind you as you clamber down the gangway, a familiar fading sound as you make your way towards your waiting bags.

It’s only later, maybe at the airport or in the familiar shower of your childhood home, that you start to wake up again, and wonder “What just happened? What was that?” and the Semester At Sea experience begins its ascension into the realm of The Best Dreams Ever, departing summer memories already surfing between reality and dreamscape.

And with that I will conclude this rambling series of Semester At Sea voyage musings with the words of Dr.Who:

“There are worlds out there where skies are burning, where the seas are asleep and rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. C’mon Ace, we’ve got work to do.”

It was a whirlwind trip — a winding ride over the Atlas Mountains, the elusive Timbuktu beckoning just beyond the jagged sandy edge — a long, long bus ride punctuated by sandy sleep, camels, nomads and sensory souqs in Marakech.

We were fortunate to have a world class novelist, Ruth Setton, sailing with us this summer. She’s the author of The Road to Fez — a  beautiful tale set in Morocco (I highly recommend it). I finished her book Marakech. Born in Morocco and raised in the USA we share that first generation experience. We’ve bonded over the hyphen (I will explain this later!) and she’s going to be a mentor of sorts for my American portraits project. Meeting and befriending Ruth has been one of the best parts of this summer for me.

This is a brief blog entry, not doing justice to the magic and mystery to be found in Morocco. But I will return to this place, and I will venture into the desert and stay a bit longer this time, watching that sunset and sunrise  over sand dunes.

And to see the official Semester At Sea audio slideshow click on this link:

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/morocco.html

The pyramids at Giza rise out of the desert, defiant, in a surreal environment that is beautiful, hostile and transient all at once. The sands shift as the wind blows as it has done for millennia, and your footsteps — the proof that you were there — disappear almost as soon as you move away.

And yet, the pyramids remain. I stood there in awe at the base of these surreal oddities created so very long ago, with large stone blocks from far away down the Nile. I kept thinking about the incredible effort that went into building each one. It is superhuman, hard to fathom really. Under the fierce July sun it was daunting just walking around one pyramid.  I can’t imagine the prospect of moving even just one of the thousands of blocks that make up the pyramids.

The desert (and the fierce spirit that it demands) is foreign to me. On this Semester At Sea voyage I have been thinking a great deal how environment affects a people. I think about my adopted home San Francisco, with its mild climate and the whimsical assortment of homes built within inches of one another as the colorful streets drape themselves  like rainbow ribbons over the impossible hills and valleys. San Francisco is open, mild, imaginative, liberal (and some will say to a fault) and the opposite of uniform. The opposite of fierce. For me, the Egyptian experience is intricately intertwined with a desert .  It was beautiful but also intense and foreign, all sandy yellow, light blue sky, blinding bright sun-god white that has dominated the culture for thousands of years.

I had a few interactions with locals that went from friendly to intense in a short amount of time, and I was disquieted by these interactions. There was one in particular, in which I stood there looking into another’s eyes, trying to explain myself and my point of view, and I realized that the expanse to be bridged for understanding at that moment was as wide as the ocean, as incomprehensible as the Sahara. I quit speaking mid-thought and had to just walk away, which is hard for me to do. I always want to make things right and good in all my interactions. Ask me in person and I will tell you about what happened — but as I thought about it all my mind kept wandering back to the pyramids, standing stoically still after all these years with the sand whispering around them. I thought about the effect of the environment on people collectively. And I realized that the Egyptians — or anyone who lives in a country that is mostly desert — will have an innate fierceness drawn from the land. And me — I originally come from a land where a white blanket of glittery snow covers the land like a fairytale — and now I live in a happy city that could have been the scene for a wholesome, wonderous Dr.Seuss book.

Changing gears slightly (and please forgive the pun) there is an astonishing car culture emerging in Egypt.  I interviewed professor Maniates, who teaches courses on sustainability for the Egypt/Semester At Sea slideshow. He informed me that in recent years car owenership in Egypt has skyrocketed at a rate of 400%. I found the whole scene to be very Mad Max  in this hot, dusty desert setting. I spent an hour making portraits of salvage shops in Alexandria — a whole area with one shop after another overflowing with car parts. Please check out the ISE slideshow  to hear Professor Maniates:

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/egypt.html

In the meantime, here’s a sampling of the rest of my images from Egypt:

The city is quite large, home to some 12.8 million and it is supposedly the 5th largest city in the world. It straddles two continents — Europe and Asia — separated by the Bosphorous Strait. The ship docked on the European side, but a group of us did manage to take a ferry to the Asian side one day. That may very well be the least expensive way to travel from Europe to Asia — a $0.75 ferry ride!

I hope that I will be able to return to Istanbul to shoot a story one day — this is a city I would love to get lost in. Here is the official SAS slideshow — it looks at the cultural melting pot that is Istanbul as East meets West:

http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyage-blog/summer-2010/new-audio-slideshow-istanbul-turkey-where-east-meets-west.php

And as always, a sampling of images too:

Greece is a gorgeous country with so many connections to life as we know it in the USA. The day that we arrived I tagged along on an FDP (field directed practica) with Professor Patterson’s classes (he teaches courses on philosophy and speech-making). We visited the Agora , the ancient marketplace situated below the Acropolis and  then Plato’s Academy in Athens.  These are the sites where Western rhetoric, philosophy, and democratic leadership were born.

It was an incredibly hot day but a silent reverence prevailed as we made our way through the ruins. The students took turns reading excerpts from a few of the great speeches. As I listened to the ancient wise words, sailing from the lips of 20-year old Americans, my hands found their way to the ancient ruins the we were sitting on and around, the bits of columns and the parts of statues scattered everywhere. They were warm under the hot sun and smooth, like bodies almost. And as I listened to the speeches it felt to me that the old stones were alive somehow — that the spirit of democracy that took root here lives on. And it does.

The next day I joined another trip and headed off to a Mykonos, an island about four away from Athens by ferry. It is a traditional Cycladic village, complete with the white houses with blue wooden doors and balconies. It was an overnight trip organized by Semester At Sea — and the best part was that I made a new friend (and quite possibly found a mentor for my ongoing American Mestizaje photo project) in Professor Nancy Fairly, an anthropologist who has studied Africa (Ghana mostly) and African Diaspora.  In the fall, I am planning to spend a month shooting  in Astoria (Queens) and the Bronx in New York City — reported to be among the most ethnically diverse places on earth today.  I had a lot of questions for Nancy — and we spoke at length about America, sitting in various  seaside cafes around Mykonos, looking out at the timeless Aegean Sea.

As usual, here’s a link to the official Semester At Sea slideshow — see/hear about the archaic smile and Greek dancing:

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/greece.html

And here are a few images!

Icon in the Chora

Icon in the Chora

I was reminded of an article that I read in Modern Painters a year or so ago about Neuroaesthetics written by Tim Adams — the star of that article is professor Semir Zeki, who studies the primate visual brain. One quote in particular has stayed with me from that article: “Artists are never satisfied, because the interior and the exterior never become united in their work. We respond often more powerfully to unfinished works — Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta is the perfect example — because they both attest to a perfect concept and acknowledge its impossibility.”

This makes sense to me. I feel that everything I work on — all my projects — are eternally designated as Works In Progress, never to be completed, but perhaps slowly abandoned at some point. After all, a story is never really finished is it? I have heard that even Picasso later in life was once caught putting some finishing touches to masterpieces prior to a exhibition to the horror of the curators.

The idea of the incomplete in art is an interesting thing to ponder — all that is not shown in a work of art, whether it’s due to the ravages of time like gorgeous mosaics in the Chora, or by deliberate manipulations like Ruth Claxton’s Postcards series (the work used to illustrate the Modern Painters article) or if by deliberate omission, such as New York-based artist Laura Carton’s “Stripped” series, in which she shifts the narrative of porn images she downloaded from the internet by removing the bodies and then reconstructing the gap left in backgrounds using Photoshop.

Ruth Claxton's Postcards

From Laura Cartons's "Stripped" Series

I am still thinking it all through and will write more about this topic of incomplete art (or rather art with omissions) at a later date. But as sort of an ending thought, that which is not shown in a work of art becomes as important as that which is shown — and it shifts the meaning of the image too, as if looking at it from a different perspective. It becomes an illusion. And if I understand Dr. Zeki correctly, this absence might actually engage the human visual brain more for it presents both a question of “what else is there” and a promise of elusive perfection — and that is an enticing combination.

You can go to Dubrovnik and not see a single trace of the war if you want to — I almost did. Following a scuba dive the dive master offered to drive me around town to show me the sights after finding out that I was a photographer. One place that he took me to was an abandoned mansion tucked away on the coast just outside of Dubrovnik. Broken glass, rotting staircases, and the effects of family that left quickly and permanently littered the ground. Outside, on the rock coastline below the mansion, Croatians laughed and swam in the sea, their voices carrying inside.

Years later the mansion still stands here, frozen in time, tied up in Communist land title red tape, uninhabited except maybe by ghosts. Although Ivan (the dive master) tells me that movie star John Malkovich was trying to buy it.

For the SAS slideshow I did not focus on the war — instead there is the sea, the Old Town, the graceful summer festival, and more. To view the audio slideshow click on this link:

http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyage-blog/summer-2010/beauty-in-the-aftermath-dubrovnik-15-years-after-the-croatian-war-of-independence.php

And as always, a few images….thanks for reading!Click to view slideshow.

I produced 2 slideshows for our stop in Italy, viewable on the Semester At Sea website. The first piece is about Il Palio, which is a horse race among competing neighborhoods (called contrades) held in Sienna 2 times a year. It dates back to the 13th century (that’s quite a tradition!). A special invitation was extended to Semester At Sea to get a behind the scenes look at race preparation by one of the 13 contrades. Although we were not there for the actual race, the opportunity to see how it all comes together and to behold this rich tradition first hand was quite a treat. Here is the link to view the slideshow:

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/il-palio.html

And below is a link to a second more involved slideshow that looks at conflict, grace and glory in Italy throughout the ages. See Rome, Vatican, Jewish Ghetto, Herculaneum and more:

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/italy.html

And a few images:

Thanks for reading!

Click here to view the audio slideshow that I produced about Barcelona for the   the Semester At Sea website. Check out Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, local markets (a foodie’s dream), a bit of flamenco and more!

Here’s a selection of images:

In other news I found THE PERFECT gazpacho!

Mmmmmmm!

The best gazpacho I have ever encountered!

http://www.ise.virginia.edu/video/A10/academical-village.html

And below are a few photos….