If you are as tired as I am of keeping spinning plates in the air and beating back the unending email and never getting to the vacuuming/lawnmowing and the danged car has a funny sound all of a sudden and the cat’s sick and the kids keep saying “I’m bored” (WHEN IS SCHOOL STARTING AGAIN?)….

….then take a breather and stare at a nice picture.

Yes, it really is that lovely in Hawaii.

We should get on a plane and go, really.

Do not tempt me.

In this digital age, when it takes but a second to take a photograph and freeze a moment of time, it’s hard to remember that this wasn’t always the case.

In the early days of photography, taking a single photograph could take minutes, if not hours. It involved a  having subjects stay motionless while the photographer huddled under a black cover of an enormous camera, manually adjusting the lens to get the right amount of light through. And even before the subject was posed,  photographers who used the ‘wet collodion process’ for preparing the photographic plate had to handle powerful chemicals, many of which had potentially life-threatening side-effects.

I’d forgotten all this until a recent visit to the Isle of Wight where I chanced upon Dimbola Museum, the restored home of the Victorian era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Julia only became a photographer by chance, at the age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera for Christmas thinking it might just cheer her up. It not only cheered her up, it turned Julia into possibly the world’s very first celebrity photographer.

 She was, you could say, in the right place at the right time. With Queen Victoria and Albert in residence at Osborne House, the Isle of Wight was one of the most fashionable places to live, attracting thinkers, writers, artists, and scientists like a magnet.

And Julia was in the thick of it, photographing them all, whether they liked it or not, including Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the superstar of the Victorian age, who was her next door neighbor. Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, John Keats, Robert Browning, actress Ellen Terry, and Alice Liddell (the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s ’Alice in Wonderland’) were just a few of the visitors that Julia captured on camera.

But instead of just taking a straight forward portrait, Julia insisted on staging her subjects in many diverse and creative ways, fading and blurring images, often dressing them up in ways that illustrated classical themes and subjects from Tennyson’s poems. It caused some criticism in the photographic establishment of the time, but still her work won her a ‘gold medal’ in Berlin and in 1867 she was awarded an ‘honourable mention’ at the Paris Exposition, no mean feat in the male dominated profession.

Wandering around Dimbola , looking at the photographs of all the famous people that Julia photographed, offers a fascinating glimpse of a bygone era.

But I’d have to say my favorite is the photograph of astronomer and scientist John Herschel, a long time friend of Julia’s who helped introduce her to the new science of photography.

The flabby mess of a man trudged out of the sparkling lagoon like a lazy yeti loping through thick forest undergrowth. His head was cleanly shaved, his back was carpeted in a fine layer of fuzzy black moss. Sagging love handles drooped indifferently over his tiny swimsuit, a flesh-colored piece of fabric that stopped mid-thigh and clung tightly—much, much too tightly—to a paunchy buttocks defined in horrific detail.

His dimure Russian princess watched expectedly from the bathwater-warm water as he shook himself dry, like a dog, and reached for his camera. He attached the wide-angle lens. A glorious spectacle, shot on location at the Sheraton Maldives Full Moon Resort & Spa, was about to begin for a captive audience comprised of two gawking couples and me, an unassuming voyeur poorly disguising his delight and disgust behind a pair of aviators and a copy of Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar.

With pixie-sized steps she slowly, wistfully, drags her feet across the coral-strewn sand, a beauty slowing marching towards the beast, eyes glazed and empty as if in trance. Her bleached-blond hair is pulled back into a bun, her sunglasses hang low on the crown of her nose. She hikes her black-and-white, leopard-print bikini bottom higher up over the curves of her bony hips, then stares down at her chest and shakes her shoulders from side to side until she’s satisfied that the shimmering gold sequins that hang from her necklace are sitting just right.

The stage is set. Everything is in its right place. Lights, camera, action!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Twenty minutes before the show began the star performers were swimming about 50 feet from the lagoon’s shore. The water was about shoulder-level high when she stopped floating and stood up. Like a walrus in heat, he snorkeled in her direction until his forehead was suggestively pressed again her stomach. He stayed there for a few minutes; she giggled, then laughed, as his hands, hidden below the surface, groped… the sandy bottom in search of colorful sea shells.

Ten minutes to go. The snorkeling gear has been abandoned as they wade towards the thatched-roof bungalows that stand in rows atop stilts of cement. A tall, lean Japanese man walks out onto his deck in a white bathrobe and white slippers, slowly sipping a cup of coffee as he pensively looks out on the spectacular horizon. All around him, around me, around the other couples, is the hypnotic natural beauty of the Maldives.

If he looks down and peers through the cracks of the bungalow’s wooden floorboards, however, he’ll see another sight: a burly man and a dimunitive woman, wrapped atop one another like a pig in a blanket, lips locked in sloppy soft-porn passion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She lays down on the shore, undoes her bun, and flips her hair back once, twice, a third time before tying it back up again. (Snap, snap, snap) Back precisely arched and hands firmly planted in the sand, as if she’s practiced for this moment for months, she bends her knees and throws her head back as he quickly circles and crouches like a photographer shooting the cover girl of next year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

Snap, snap, snap. Click, click, click.

He motions; she arches her back even further. He motions again, this time towards the water, so she stands up and slowly picks her way back into the lagoon. Suddenly, dramatically, she stops and pirouettes (snap snap snap) to face his camera, neck craned, chin up, arms raised like a triumphant ice dancer bowing to the crowd at the end of a gold-medal routine.

The bizarre water routine goes on for about 5 minutes (or, roughly, 100 photos) before she makes her way back onto the shore for the dramatic curtain call: on all fours now, she’s vamping her way through the sand like Tawny Kitaen crawling across the hood of David Coverdale’s Jaguar in “Here I Go Again”. Here’s a picture set to show the grandkids one day!

Snap, snap, snap, click, click, click, snap, snap, snap.

He hands the camera over and dutifully marches into the water himself, chest puffed out like a 1920s strongman and that teensy-tiny, flesh-colored swimsuit of his further disappearing into the nebulous void of his crack. He poses for a few shots before clamboring out onto a 30-foot long cement platform that juts out into the water. She assumes the position on the sand, he carefully adjusts the lens, then starts the timer and jumps down next to her for a couple’s session.

Here they are casually laying side by side on the beach, gazing back up at their camera without a trace of ironic self-awareness creeping across their stoic expressions. There they are sitting back to back, elbows on knees like Rodin’s Thinker. Here now they’re standing, his meaty slabs of arm draped over and squeezing her like an infant suffocating its favorite teddy bear.

Finally, the grand finale: laying shoulder to shoulder on their stomachs, they turn their heads to face one another, lean in, and hold an extended kiss, one which starts innocently enough but quickly devolves into a full-blown makeout session. I’d be appalled if I wasn’t so mesmerized by the absurdity of it all.

Bravo, guys, bravo. Encore! Encore!

And we got one.

Later that night, as we headed back to our room after a few mugs of Tiger beer at the resort bar, we spot our two friends near the pool, which is fed by a man-made waterfall and illuminated at night by a few pairs of underwater lights. She’s traded her leopard-print bikini for a tightly fitted hot-pink dress, but is posing and preening and arching and vamping just as she was on the beach.

He casts a nearly imperceptible, mostly indifferent glance our way as we walk by, then gets back to the business of the photo shoot. It looks like he’s waiting on his camera flash to recharge; I don’t have my camera with me this time.

I look down at my watch.

It’s 11:24pm.

Springtime, Paris, 1956.

A young photographer named Inge Morath had just returned to home, after a five week trip in Iran. She’d traveled for some of that time on her own, something that was neither common, nor a simple matter for a woman at that time.  But as a passionate lover of history and literature, Morath wanted to understand Iran. She later said she was “very interested in the region, in old civilizations which are suddenly overbalanced by modern times.”

That was her personal mission, on the professional side, she went on assignment for a magazine, with instructions to get pictures of carpets and mosques. (She also worked for the Magnum agency, a stock house, and secured a couple of corporate photography gigs to boot.)  She used two cameras: color film for her assignments, for which she exposed 40 rolls, black and white for her own photos, for which she exposed more than 100 rolls. This amounted to more than 5,000 pictures all together.

Unbeknownst to Morath, the camera she’d been using for her black and white film had been damaged – it had a light leak, which created a light stain down the middle of many of her negatives. Her color photography from the trip was published as planned, in the magazine, and in a book, and she’d go on to photograph all over the world and see her work well-published and exhibited. (She’d also go on to marry Arthur Miller, with whom she collaborated until her death in 2002.)  But the majority of the black and white photos that she took in Iran were not published in her lifetime.

With the aid of digital clean-up of the light stain, The Inge Morath Foundation recently released a handsome coffee table sized book containing the photographs she made on this trip. Inge Morath: Iran contains photographs that not only reach far beyond the enduring cliché of turbans and rifles and flying carpets, but also provide context to the images that we see from Iran today.

The book includes excerpts of a conversation between Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and John P. Jacob, director of the Inge Morath foundation. “She’s very subversive,” says Nafisi of Morath and her photos.  “Having been told to take pictures of Persian carpets and the blue mosques, she goes and shows us the little girls working the carpet factories.” She points out that Morath avoids obvious, easy symbols of a country becoming Westernized (nightclubs and unveiled women), and instead finds this theme in unusual places – like, in the interaction of Western and local workers at an oil refinery.   It’s a subversiveness that I certainly appreciate, as a writer who’s traveled on assignments that lay somewhere off the path of my own personal interests.  And I’d daresay it’s a quality that anyone who’s taken a trip on someone else’s agenda  — a business traveler, a participant in a group trip –  can appreciate as well.

What I love the best about this book is the sense that you get of Morath, as a traveler, trying to figure out what Iran is all about.  The book’s editor, John P. Jacob, points out  that Morath’s photos from the beginning of the trip are more conventional – donkeys, women baking bread – but as the trip goes on, are far less so. “The reason is not that Iran became less mysterious to her; but rather that she allowed the mystery to become a part of the story she was telling,” he says.

To which Nafisi says this: “Most people who go to Iran fall in love with it because people seem so welcoming. There is a welcome, but that doesn’t mean that people are opening to you. It means that they are treating you as a dear guest…There is a shroud over many of the photographs, as if to  say that what is there, is not being wholly revealed.”

Personally, I find the questions that hover over the photographs refreshing.  There’s something so presumptive about a person who travels to a place for a brief time making a definitive statement about it  — although as opinionated human beings mentally wired to generalize, travelers are wont to theorize. (And it’s part of the job description for travel photographers and writers, however uneasily it sits.)  But in her photos, Morath is able to capture both what she thinks is happening, and what she’s still not sure about.

For instance, look at Morath’s photo of the young girls knotting rugs, above.  This is child labor, and those little girls are most likely not able to get down from that high perch on their own. But then look at the little girl at the bottom. She seems to be smiling, certainly doesn’t seem mistreated. What exactly is happening here? It’s a question that this photo raises, indeed, it’s the question that is almost constantly coursing through my mind whenever I travel.

The solution, suggests Nafisi is this: “If we cannot reveal everything, let’s have the idea that this place is defined as much by what it doesn’t reveal as by what it does.”  Rather than saying, “This is how Iranians are,” in the language of authority, with Morath there is just her own narrative: “I was there.”

Related Perceptive Travel story: Dark Side of the Moon in Iran

Some of you long-time readers may remember that when we launched the Perceptive Travel Blog on March 21, 2007, one of the original contributors was UK-based travel photographer Steve Davey.

Eventually, Steve had to move on to other obligations, but he still helps judge the Perceptive Travel Remarkable Photo Contest and he also wrote about Debre Damo monastery in Ethiopia for the magazine.

While we were sorry to lose his wit and fabulous photos on the blog, we’ve continued to follow his travels with interest, including the photo tours that he leads all over the world with the support of Intrepid Travel.

The good news is that his latest offering looks really interesting, and we thought we’d share it with our readers.

The “Impressions of Ladakh” photo tour is scheduled for 12 – 27 July, 2010 starting in New Delhi, and Steve will lead a small group (12 people maximum) through this wild mountainous region on a trip that offers….

“A unique opportunity to improve your travel photography, whilst exploring the highlights of Ladakh in the company of a professional travel photographer.”

It’s a wide-ranging itinerary, with notable monateries and towns, the Tak Thok Tse Chu festival and Dharamsala, the home of the exiled Dalai Lama and the government of Tibet in exile.  Note that:

“This tour will be travelling through some difficult territory, and much of it will be at altitude. It will be a more physical trip that others which Steve has run, and a reasonable level of fitness and mobility will be required. If you are concerned about this, please contact Steve to discuss your situation.”

If you’re interested, contact Steve and tell him his old Perceptive Travel blogging friends sent you!