travling photography

Photo �  Takehiko Yagi -All Rights Reserved "I have been fascinated by the colors of the sacred festival of Holi for nine years now. I fell in love with the festival for the first time when I saw it on television as a high school student."  This is very possibly a first.  My Twitter feed has the link to the photo gallery  Diving Into The Colors of Holi by Japanese photographer Takehiko Yagi, and naturally I followed it to view it. Scrolling down the intensely colored images of the well known Indian festival, I stopped at the above photograph, showing the spiritual intensity on the faces of devotees in the temple of Banke Bihari in Vrindavan, the epicenter of the Holi festival.  I recognized this exact scene because I was there as well....at the same time, and photographed these very same devotees. And then I remembered being shoulder to shoulder with an Asian photographer, who, now I know, was Takehiko Yagi. We were both swathed in scarves and eye protections; our cameras pr

I'm very pleased that Hanoi Grapevine has featured news of my photo book  H?u �?ng: The Spirit Mediums of Viet Nam   on its popular portal. Hanoi Grapevine describes itself an important and active promoter of the arts in Vietnam. It provides bilingual content of high-quality art and culture happenings in the contemporary landscape of the country and offer reviews by interested, informed and opinionated commentators.  It has also announced that Hanoi�s expats and local citizens will have chance to talk to me about �?o M?u and H?u �?ng when I am in Hanoi in early November for a number of appearances at different photo talk venues. Fuller details will be announced on this blog once I have the firm dates. The venues are in central Hanoi and are popular for art, photography and music events.

All Photographs � 2016 Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved I remember  September 12, 2014 very well. I was in Sa Pa, the famous hill station in northern Viet Nam, and despite the early morning humidity, the Black Hmong vendors were already waiting for tourists. I was walking on Fansipan Road, bantering with some of them, when I heard religious music wafting from a nondescript building. I asked the vendors and was told it was a temple. I walked in and met women dressed in red traditional clothes who, through sign language, told me that a ceremony would start at 9:00 am. This is how my two-year long journey into the world of  �?o M?u, the indigenous Vietnamese mother goddess religion and h ?u d?ng , the  ritual of spirit mediumship, started. Totally by accident. Serendipitously.  I was flabbergasted that I hadn't heard of  �?o M?u before. My so-called specialty as a travel photographer is/was ethno-photography with special interest in esoteric religions and cults. And here, on a silv