No Man Is An Island
By Cathal McNaughton
For almost 20 years Barry Edgar Pilcher has lived alone on the island of Inishfree.
He is the sole permanent inhabitant of the tiny windswept island off the coast of Co Donegal in Ireland where he writes poetry and plays music. Once a week – weather permitting – Barry, 69, makes the 15 minute boat journey to Burtonport, where he does his weekly shopping in a petrol station. He posts letters and picks up the modest provisions he will need for the week and then it’s back to his ramshackle cottage where he lives and works in a single room.
Without basic sanitation, running water or a telephone and with a leaky roof and problems with dampness, Barry’s cottage is without any modern comforts. He has a peat-burning stove to provide warmth but he has to be frugal as any fuel has to be carried back from the mainland.
Privileged witness to the start of life
By Vivek Prakash
It’s an experience I will never forget. I have no children of my own, but when the day does come, maybe I’ll be just a little bit more prepared for it.
I had come a long, long way from my usual cosmopolitan stomping ground of Mumbai, to a place just about as far interior as you can go in India. I was about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Rajasthan border in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in a village of about 700 people. This is very, very small by Indian standards. There were dusty roads that a car could barely fit down, mud houses, a scorching heat during the day which turned to a deep chill at night.
I had many ideas in my head and many questions too – what kind of emotions was I going to experience and witness? Should I be excited, or should I feel like an intruder, given the subject matter I was here to shoot? I had come a long way to shoot this, but now, standing in this little rural community health center with my camera, I felt conflicted.
Thanks for bringing the story to our notice.Commendable initiative. Great answer to all those shamless and ungrateful cynics who keep saying “is desh ka kuch nahi hoga”. Just wanted to know if the lady in question here was okay with being shot while giving birth to a baby. Such a situation for a woman as I know is personal and not many would like to have such pictures published.
Passing seven billion
By Jorge Silva
It was during my eternal search for unique moments to capture that I was witness to the most spectacular and magical event – the arrival of a new life.
The United Nations announced the pending birth of the planet’s inhabitant number 7,000,000 for October 31, and that gave me the chance to work on a series of photos that became the most emotional and satisfying of my career.
The moment a baby is born is doubtless one of the most intimate and special in the life of a woman and her family, and sharing that intimacy as a privileged observer was sensational. To live that experience without having become a father yet was even more moving.
All emotions came to the surface during the birthing. The most intense pain together with the most tender caresses and great joy, all played together during the demonstration of tireless work and strength of the medical staff. They were images of the efforts necessary to give birth, and the struggle for integral health.
I agree that childbirth is a wonderful experience. Everyone who wishes to do so, should have one baby and treasure that experience… but not more.
Jugderdem’s backyard
By Carlos Barria
Two-year-old Jugderdem Myagmarsuren opens the door of his tent to play with his plastic scooter in the backyard. He is accompanied by sheep and cows. This is not an ordinary backyard. It’s the Mongolian steppe, and his closest friends might live more than two kms (1.2 miles) away.
While the world’s population reached 7 billion on October 31st, 2011, Mongolia remains the least densely populated country on the planet, with 2.7 million people spread across an area three times the size of France. Two-fifths of Mongolians live in rural areas spread over wind swept steppes.
According to the National Population Center census of 2010, Mongolia’s population density increased by only 0.2 percentage points– to 1.7 persons per square kilometer—from the last census in 2000.
A village of eternal bachelors
By Vivek Prakash
With the world’s population set to hit 7 billion on October 31, photographers in India have been on the move to tell stories that talk about what those numbers really mean in a country as large as India – with 1.2 billion people and counting, this is supposed to be the world’s largest democracy.
When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures – the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years – from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies — who are seen as breadwinners — has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal.
We had been trying to find ways to illustrate this for some time without much success – getting access to tell this story had been taking some time. Late last month, a story about a small village in Gujarat was brought to my attention.
Journalists from the Thomson Reuters Foundation had visited Siyani, a small rural town of just 8,000 people (tiny by Indian standards) – where the social effect of such a low ratio of women meant that men were having a tough time finding brides. I set out to remote Gujarat to try and interpret this story with my camera.
If nature is left alone there would be no shortage of women. Birth records show that infants arrive in this world in a ratio of about 51% male to 49% female IF left to nature. When humans learned how to select which sex would be allowed to mature in the womb and be born, the problem of no women for some men to marry developed. MAN made problem. Until girl babies are as prized as much male babies the problem will exist and even worsen. Wise up men of India and welcome girl babies as much as male babies or your sons will have no wives or children
Labor pains and flashbacks
It was a hot and humid Wednesday morning when I finally received much sought after permission to document childbirth at the government-run Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital.
I suited up with excitement. I put on a hospital gown together with a mask and cap that I bought inside the hospital. I entered a two-door room filled with doctors and nurses. I walked around and found the labor room on the left side. It had six beds but all were occupied. There was a patient on the first bed who was uneasy, fear flashed in her eyes. Medical staff stood next to the bed to counsel her. Next to her was a doctor conducting an internal exam on a mother, I could see her pain while waiting to be fully dilated. In no time they transferred her into the delivery room.
I couldn’t help but notice the pain in every contraction as the mothers lay in bed. They were dressed in white dusters and their body shifted from one side to another. As moans echoed from every corner, a familiar feeling flashed back; my first birthing experience two years ago. I could somehow feel again what they were going through, the only difference was I was able to watch and capture the pain this time with my cameras.
Women on stretchers were being wheeled in and out. As the clock ticked, the numbers went up at the country’s busiest maternal hospital which sees an average of sixty births a day. But that is small compared to over a hundred daily deliveries during peak season in this hospital alone.
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The Wall
TO EVE PILCHER: Glad to read what you wrote about Barry. I’ve been in touch with Barry on and off over the years and exchanged poetry. You may not remember me – but I used to visit with you and Barry in Roath / Cardiff in . . . 1976 I think. We used to have musical evenings and I enjoyed your ’cello playing. I was sorry to lose touch with you. I visited you once in Devises of all places . . . You may be interested to know that you are mentioned in Volume I of ‘an odd boy’ my memoirs of the Arts in the 1960s and 1970s. You probably remember me as Chögyam Togden. As an author of books on Vajrayana I use them name Ngakpa Chögyam and in the Arts field I’m know as Doc Togden.