Open Your Eyes: Rising Waters

This image shows a deserted Maldivian island. It's amazingly beautiful. It's romantic with the waves hitting the white sandy beach, three palm trees in the background, cotton candy clouds hanging in the deep blue sky. The island is a dream.

It will also be gone soon.

In the picture you can see that if the water surface rises only 30 centimeters, the island will be wiped off the maps. But it's not just about this island. It's a metaphor for all the insular states around the world, whose populations will have to look for a new home soon. It's a metaphor of the effects of globalization, because whatever the Western states do for their gain affects countries on the other side of the globe in one way or another.

In this case, one state's gain is the loss of another state.

Open Your Eyes: From a Child's Point of View

This boy is standing alone in front of a big shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand.
Why do his eyes look frightened? What does he see?

He sees... us.

He sees masses of anonymous grown-ups busily passing by, using their elbows to push others away. He sees a world where everyone just cares for themselves and the only rule is the survival of the strongest. He sees his own future. Or does he?

We all are responsible for the next generation. It’s our duty to be good role models and for making the children feel welcome in our world, so that they are guided to adulthood without having to be afraid of the future. It's not just the parents' responsibility.

Interestingly enough, tribal societies used to raise children as if they were all the parents of that child. It didn't start being an individual process until recently. However, some still do that today. And if you ask me, they are the richest societies.

Open Your Eyes: Stormy Life

This photo was taken in Bangkok during the rainy season.

Warm summer rain, how romantic.
Surrounded by speeding cars and their exhaust fumes, the woman has to carry a heavy load through the rain to the shop she’s working at, which is about 500 meters away on the other side of the road. No-one is there to help her carry a little of her burden.

But even though she works her hands to the bone she hardly earns enough to have a colorful life. She can’t afford a car or a carriage, which would make her work easier. She can’t even afford a good pair of shoes, so she has to walk through the rain on a pair of cheap slippers. She lives to work, and works to live. There is nothing else.

However, she is strong enough to walk through all the rain showers and strong headwinds life blows in her face. She keeps going, alone, patiently. And why?

Open Your Eyes: A Child's Imagination

This picture was taken in a slum area in downtown Bangkok. A dog and a cat are strolling around, looking for food in the piles of trash. With temperatures at around 34°C the smell of warm rain water is in the air. Between dirty shacks two children are talking to each other on their mobile phones made of a piece of plastic they found somewhere around their home.

However, for a short moment the children are not poor. For a short moment, they are rich people, having fun on the phone. For a short moment, the girl even forgets that she has a broken arm. For a short moment, they are happy.

In a child’s imagination, everything is possible; children are always able to imagine a better world in their play, no matter how bad the circumstances are they find themselves in. A child’s imagination is powerful. However, somehow we lose this ability when we grow up.

Open Your Eyes: Lost Individualism

This picture was taken from the top of the Golden Mount in Bangkok, where you have a great view over the whole city.

The front of this condominium is filled with windows, and there is not much space between them. Each window stands for one person living behind it. This image is a symbol for the overpopulation in our cities, for the restrictions and the loss of individualism, which are inevitable in our modern world. We are pressed into patterns and forced to comply with standards of the system. On which side of the windows are you?

Open Your Eyes: New Photo Blog Series

What I like most about photography is that you start taking a closer look at things and you appreciate the world around you more. With this in mind I'd like to initiate a news series about the things in life we take for granted and therefore don't look at anymore. Every week I'm going to post a photo and an article. Here is the first entry:





What associations do you have with the word 'home'?

I took this picture at a home for the elderly in Bangkok. An old woman, apathetic despite the presence of the camera, sitting on a thin plastic mattress in a dark cell, which is not larger than maybe two square meters, looking through the net into the other empty cell, shielded from the light of a bright sunny day, grunts of other people and the smell of warm urine in the air. The floor is relatively clean, but this is an old building, the decayed walls tell. It looks cold although it is thirty-one degrees; there is no air-conditioner. The heavy sliding door is open, but the woman won't come out and take a walk, or just talk. All she does is clap and sing the Thai national anthem with a smile on her face, over and over again. The woman is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and will spend the rest of her life in this cell, because there is no family to take care of her. She was put into the hands of strangers, and what's even more striking: She doesn't even realize because of her disease. Maybe that's the reason why the inmates in this ward receive only minimal attention.

The woman once had a family. She worked. She was someone. She lived. Now the circle of life closes, she needs care like a baby because she can't do anything herself, just like all the other elderly in this department. Her whole life is now restricted to two square meters. Eating, sleeping, washing, defecating, all in this cell. Her home.

Not only is this picture iconic for the way our society changes. The younger generation loses their connection with the senior members of our society. What's almost the norm in Western countries becomes more and more apparent in Asia as well, which therefore sees the stereotype of a caring extended family being weakened.

This image is also look into your future, which makes you think once you leave the state of speechlessness. Anyone could end up like her. There is no guarantee that someone will take care of you later. And what have you done?