I present to you the lucky king and queen of the local school’s kindergarten. As fireworks exploded around them, they stood on the top of the car, crawling up and down the narrow alleyways, waving to their loyal subjects.

This picture was taken moments before me and my friend Ceren embarked on an overnight state bus ride from Pondicherry to Trichi where we switched to another bus leaving for Thanjavur, where my friend was starting a new job.

We knew we were entering a world of dryness that is conservative southern India, and considering that Pondicherry is more accepting of deviant (read: alcohol drinking) behavior, we stocked up here in Pondicherry. However, at the dinner beforehand, and in the time leading up to its departure, we definitely broke into the stash. By the time I took this photo as we waited for the bus, I was nice nice. And rest assured, the party did not stop once we got on the bus. We must’ve set back stereotypes of Americans decades in those 10 hours we were in that second row on the bus.

We arrived in Thanjavur at 4 AM probably, only to find out that the house Ceren was staying in was not prepared at all (we didn’t even have a key). After yelling until the landlord woke up, we slept on top of t-shirts and other clothes; too exhausted to tell if I was hungover by that point or just sore from the wooden benches of the state bus.

I had passed out with the trusty Ipod on, and when I woke up, the Outkast song ‘Git up and Get out’ was playing, I remember this because I thought to myself (cornily) that perhaps I had got out perhaps a little bit tooo much.

For the three months I spent working in Panama, I lived in the basement of a music foundation. Day in and day out, I would hear jazz practices from about 9 o’clock in the morning until 11 o’clock at night or later. Now I am no jazz fan and I prefer hip-hop or reggae to jazz any day of the week (I used to love saying this to jazz musicians just to get a rise out of them), but it would be amazing sometimes to see what some of these kids can do with their instruments.

Here is a shot of Aquiles Navarro, a trumpet player who studies at the New England Conservatory, during a rehearsal with Rogelio Mitchell.  Aquiles balls out with the trumpet by the way, even an ignorant music appreciator like myself enjoys a good trumpet blast once in a while.

Everyday from 2 to 4 PM, the Fundacion Danilo Perez opens its doors to the neighborhood’s youth for its Programa Infantil, of which my photography course was just one part. The Fundacion is first and foremost an organization that seeks to facilitate musical education in Panama, and does not the resources one would expect for an after school program. So the other employees and I kind of just make do in trying to entertain them. One way I would entertain them would be to show them the photos that I had taken of their families, houses and neighborhoods.

They loved it. They were allowed to ‘drive’, that is, man the right arrow on the keyboard. If a photo came that included them, they would dutifully name each of the other kids’ names before moving on. One kid, Darilo, loved the game more than any other, and would shout as loud as he could the name or relation of the given person in the photo. This is his aunt.

The last month I was in India, I used to play a little game with myself and my camera. Absent a project/theme, I felt uncomfortable shoving cameras in people’s face for no reason, especially considering that I didn’t know how to ask. So I would try to photographs of people while keeping them anonymous. The closer I could get, the better. I had read about Walker Evans doing a similar project on the subways of NYC in the 30s, but his problem was that he was going straight for the face rather than obscuring the identity. That of course, is not only a violation of someone’s privacy but it also creates a lot of problems when it comes to publishing the work, as no permission was sought or given. He waited decades before trying to publish them, and that was before the advent of the internet.

In the background, you can see the Virupaksha Temple, one of the many UNESCO World Heritage Sites I visited while I was there. Outside of town, scattered among boulders, are dozens of ruins from the Vijayanagara empire. Today, they are inhabited by monkeys that let you know immediately that you are on their turf and will not hesitate to threaten you with teeth and whatnot. Nothing like being humbled by a monkey, but luckily I forgot my camera’s battery in the charger that morning, so there is no photographic evidence of me getting punked by mammals.

Here is another photo from this 90 kilometer walk.

Sometimes, pictures mean less to me as time goes on, and I look at them again and again, and that initial charm wears off. Initially, I was enamored by this photo, and I wrote on 2 December 2008, ”

“I had forgotten what it is like to not have dryers (despite the fact that I am old enough to have been around when they were still relatively rare). Everywhere, especially on Sundays, laundry occupies any free space available. You will find it hanging from hand rails, electrical wires, and anything else that will hold it.

At present, there are state elections occurring throughout India. They are relatively fierce, and the banner that is furled is an advertisement for an event put on by the Communist Party (which is in power where I am at at the moment). It seems as though an opponent disagreed, and furled up the banner to prevent notice of it.”

Then, as time passed, I forgot about the picture only to recently re-discover it recently in my very disorganized archives. I don’t think it’ll reoccupy that special place it once held in my heart, but i still am incredibly curious how one lays laundry across a laundry line/electric wire that doesn’t have the pulley wheel on one side. And me being the political nerd that I am, I always appreciate some tit-for-tat political contest in the streets. And for the record, Kolkata and Hyderabad still have fights in my heart for the coveted ‘favorite Indian city’ position.

PS. Props to Jamie Lynch, @amanamongstmen, for explaining the semantic differences between unorganized and disorganized

Before I went to India, I was telling a friend of mine about the things I was planning to do there over coffee in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An eavesdropper behind me stuck his head in (I think his name was Stephon), and said, ‘you’re going to India? Look out for Doug Johnson, you’ll see him there.’ I was like, ok crazy guy, theres 1.2 billion people that live in India, how do expect me to run into one, let alone someone I don’t even know?

Lo and behold, three Doug Johnson sightings later, here I am at Gokarna, a tourism resort geared towards hippies and Israelis fresh out of their military service. It is in Karnataka state on the Arabian Sea, beach-side shacks are a dollar a day, food is cheap, the company is fun and hippies proclaim the beach over that ‘this is way better than the hustle and bustle of normal life’, as if that was a groundbreaking sentiment. Luckily, Doug Johnson (an economist fieldworker) showed up on Christmas, fresh off an assignment in Bangalore, was equally freaked out that I was there, and we were able to talk nerd-stuff for the couple days he had off for Christmas.

San Felipe is a pretty densely populated peninsula. On one side is the ‘bay’ of Panama City, where Paitilla is one side and San Felipe is the other, connected by Avenida Balboa. On the other of San Felipe is the Causeway (built by dirt excavated from what is now the Panama Canal, and after that is the Panama Canal’s opening. In this picture, you can see the causeway, beyond which is the Pacific opening to the Canal. Because it is such a small/dense place, basketball courts are one of the only places that kids can play sports in, as there is no room for a baseball/soccer field.

Now I am much more of a spectator than a player of basketball, but who thought (especially in a country where basketball isn’t exactly the most adored of sports) that it would be a good idea to put a hoop directly in front of a huge area of water? I’ve been known to put up an airball or two, and I know for a fact that that isn’t exactly Fiji Water, so this basketball court sufficed more as a place for me to teach aperture and other technical details to my photography students (the kid walking across the wall is Daniel, one of my photography students). But for the record – when I wasn’t teaching photography to the local kids, I had no problem schooling them in the ways of the basketball (not at this hoop though, at a court where this photo was taken.

I gotta give credit to my friend Henry for reminding me of this picture. I had donated 5 prints to his Valpo Surf Project’s fundraising efforts (his NGO in Valpo, Chile is very much google-able, big things poppin’), and he was flipping through my images when he came across this one. There is another one I had taken moments before that I had preferred, where Daniel is silhoetted in some shadows, but I must admit, Henry’s choice of this one has made it grow on me.

For the grand month of June, me and my friends from high school lived in New Hampshire, painting the house that Henry ‘big for nothing’ Myer built with his bare hands. Discussions centered around bears and what guns you use to kill them, food, and your 3 favorites from a given category. Good times.