Grandpa Look

Her grandfather walks the beach with her.  This is not a little stroll to water’s edge to watch her swim kind of walk.  They walk for kilometres down the beach. He walks, she sprints ahead, she finds something absolutely enthralling in the sand and stops to dig it out; he walks.  She runs ahead to try and chase the sand pipers; he walks.  She is a like a rubber band that is attached to him; first stretching far out behind, then shooting back to him.  It is a relationship that is characterized by love and trust but with enough freedom to breathe.

Sometimes it takes more than one image to tell the story.  I saw these two walking on the beach in Panama and I loved what appeared to be the casual yet clearly close nature of their relationship.  I wanted illustrate this relationship and I felt that I couldn’t really do that with just a single image.  The whole thing was too much to squeeze into one image or at least I am not a good enough photographer to see a way to do that.  So I settled on a little triptych that would work together to tell the story.

-Russell Berg

Les Misérables - Video Post

Les Miserables is a musical that carries a lot of weight for me.  I read an abridgement of the story first when I was in Mrs. Hill’s grade 8 class, I have seen two professional stage versions of it, read a much longer abridgement of it twice and directed the musical twice.  For me it sits at the pinnacle of what musical theatre can be.  It has a story which really matters, music that grabs your soul and twists hard and it is all brought together in a package that is wonderfully exhausting and completely worthwhile.  So the prospect of seeing it in a movie is something that I was, mostly looking forward to, but also somewhat afraid of.  This music, this story is very important to me and I did not want to see it sullied.

I loved Anne Hathaway.  Her performance carried a fragile grace that is so painful to watch as it is broken.  “I Dreamed a Dream” is not so much sung as torn from her by the tigers in the night.  Jackman could have paid attention to her example of acting into the song without loosing the melodic thread.  Many people have commented on the excessive use of close ups, I did not find this to be distracting for me.  The musical is a large grand thing but it is very much the story of individuals and being able to see their faces as they sing in a way that it is impossible to when you are watching it live was engaging for me.

There were some things that disappointed me.  Hugh Jackman tries to act into the music so much that we sometimes loose the melodic thread.  There are some expositional elements added to the songs to help the uninitiated through the story and I didn’t mind that until Gavroche goes on a narrative streak in the second verse of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” the was just pure exposition.  The song that they added in during Cossette and Valjean’s ride to paris did not fit with the musical themes or the tone of the musical; it was very out of place.  Javert did not bristle with the righteous intensity that his character demands and then he pins his medal on Gavroche’s dead body, I felt that that was completely out of place.  Aside from Jackman’s interpretation these are relatively small things and I really enjoyed the experienced of seeing this musical on the big screen.

The most important thing this movie did for me was to send me back to Indonesia, to the last time that I directed this musical.  It was a small international school, I think about 40-50 in the high school and they had never had a theatre program there.  Many people had trouble believing that it could be done but the talent that we had to work with was remarkable and the willingness to work hard was incredible.  I remember so clearly that everyone was on stage in bare feet during a dress rehearsal and we were doing “Master of The House” and someone broke a glass and everyone just kept going, dancing around the broken glass.  I remember that we had 3, well 2, wireless mics and the mic changes where sometimes had to be tricky and very quick.  Kayla coming up to Song-Min right down stage, pretending to talk to him and removing his mic without anyone noticing, Jenna coughing up her mic in a bowl as she died, Sam Ee crawling under the stage to deliver his mic.  I remember how great they all sounded when the chorus broke out in to full voice.  I remember Song-Min holding Megan then carrying her off on a severely injured knee.  I remember Ari stuffing jewelry and a giant blanket? down her blouse during “Master of The House”.  I remember Korey rushing over to me to explain some disaster during a performance in Korean.  I remember Peter Seow saving our young vocalists if they got a little lost.  I remember “Confrontation” as Sam Ee and Johnny, our two vocal thoroughbreds went at each other.  I remember the way the last note of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” ringing through the multi-pupose room until the applause broke out.  I remember seeing our young inexperienced cast hear the applause and know that they had told the story well.  That they had sung like angels and danced with all their hearts.  It was a wonderful experience.  Thank-you to all of the Papua kids who shared it with me.  I have put together a little clip collection of some of the highlights of the show.  Hopefully it brings back as many good memories for you as it did for me.

-Russell Berg

25 Years

Young lovers in a stream.  He has set the timer on the camera and scrambled over the rocks to be there on time.  The shutter clicks and they sit on the edge of the water, talking.  They sit on the rock and they are unaware of so many things.  There is the sparkle and shine of a new relationship and the whole world is lit with that light.  They don't understand what love means or how it changes a person.  They don't know that what they have is only the beginning of what it will become; for their love will have time to grow and breath and become something else entirely, something so much more real.  The babies will come and the lovers will see in each of the children a little of themselves, a little more of the other to love in the small hand that reaches up to grasp their finger.  Their love will be tested and tempered in a furnace that produces a new thing that is once again different, and beautiful and strong.  They find in the other the better angels of their own nature and they look forward to what is next.

-Russell Berg

The Banjo King

A lonely busker sits on the street, plucking at his banjo. Fuji X10 28mm f/2.8 1/1000 ISO 200

There is something that rises inside of him and pushes against the inside of his skull.  It is almost an ache, a presence there in his brain that is only relieved when his fingers are moving, when the sound comes and the vibrations pulse.  Music sits deep inside him and it must find an exit.  This creative impulse is at the centre of himself and it must needs find a way out.

Sometimes getting a good picture is simply a matter of having a camera with you.  I was driving around Victoria and stopped at a light.  I looked over to my left and saw this guy sitting on the sidewalk.  I grabbed my X10 out of my purse and quickly snapped off an image.  I wanted to put him off centre and to have a large empty space in the sidewalk so I composed and snapped before the light changed.  The amount of thought and planning I put into the image was minimal but having my camera with me and ready to go made the image possible.

-Russell Berg

Video Post: Against All Odds

Against All Odds: HIV/AIDS Epidemic Among Indigenous Papuans from Andri Tambunan on Vimeo. 

I don't often feature the work of other photographers on this blog but Papua is a place that has a special kind of hold on me.  Andri Tambunan is a young documentary photographer working to bring awareness to the large and growing AIDS situation in Papua.  My family and I lived there for a year so I can speak from personal experience to many of things that he is talking about and the situation is alarming.  Human trafficking of sex trade workers into this area is a huge problem and when you combine that with the prevalence of AIDS it ends up being a death sentence for many of these women.  No foreign journalist can get a visa to to enter Papua so many of the issues and events that happen there are almost completely unreported in the world's press.  We saw and heard pitched battles with gunfire, explosions and helicopters flying all night as independence fighters battled with government forces and none of this made it out to world press.  Andri's photographs carry a power and immediacy that reflects the dire situation yet also reflects the hope and the spirit of these wonderful people.  Check out his blog for more images.

-Russell Berg