Michael Yamashita 사진전 - 마르코폴로의 길을 걷다 (9/20-10/31)

[미니]

*** 얼마 전에 잡지에서 이 분 사진을 보고 감동했는데 서울광장에서 전시회가 열리고 있는 중이네요. ***

기사 출처: 일간스포츠
http://ilgan.joins.com/news/200409/16/200409161012598732110000110100110101.html

700여년 전 마르코 폴로의 '동방견문록' 여정을 기록한 사진전 '마르코 폴로의 길을 걷다'가 20일부터 10월31일까지 시청앞 서울광장에서 펼쳐진다.

환경재단(상임이사 최 열) 주최로 24시간 무료로 열리는 이번 사진전은 환경재단 그린 페스티벌이 5월부터 석달간 세종문화회관 앞 인도에서 가졌던 야외사진전 '80일간의 세계일주 그리고 서울의 기억'에 이은 두번째 전시이다.

'마르코 폴로의 길을 걷다'전은 '내셔널 지오그래픽'의 대표 작가인 마이클 야마시타가 1998년부터 3년간 '동방견문록'의 여정을 따라가며 찍은 다큐멘터리 사진 90점과 해설로 구성된다. 이 사진들은 '내셔널 지오그래픽'에 2001년 5월호부터 3회에 걸쳐 연재됐다.

베네치아에서 베이징(北京)까지 아름다운 자연환경, 전쟁, 빈곤, 지진으로 인한 환경파괴의 현장, 그리고 복구를 위해 노력하는 모습을 담은 사진들이 소개된다.

이라크와 주변 지역의 분쟁, 700년 전 세계 최대 항구였던 취안저우가 항구의 기능을 상실한 채 방치된 모습, 조수간만의 차로 계절과 시간에 따라 시시각각으로 모습이 변하는 베네치아, 파미르 고원지대에서도 가장 오지에 속한다는 칼리쿨리호에서 평화롭게 풀을 뜯고 있는 말들의 모습을 만날 수 있다.

일본계 미국 작가인 야마시타는 1979년부터 '내셔널 지오그래픽'의 정규 기고가로 일하고 있다. 야마시타는 9.11테러 이전에 이라크를 방문한 마지막 미국 사진작가로, 이번 전시회에서는 9.11 이전 평화로운 이라크의 모습을 볼 수 있다. 또한 아프가니스탄 내전중 사망한 북부동맹 지도자 마수드의 모습도 들어 있다.

정치, 경제, 지리, 환경정보로 가득찬 설명문과 함께 작품들을 '동방견문록'과 같은 순서로 배치, 관람객들은 '동방견문록'을 따라 실크로드를 여행하는 듯한 기분을 느낄 수 있다.

전시기간 야마시타가 마르코 폴로의 여정을 좇아 촬영하는 모습을 담은 다큐멘터리가 방영돼 관객들의 이해를 돕는다. ☎725-3654. (서울=연합뉴스)

*** 내셔널지오그래픽 홈페이지에서 마이클 야마시타의 사진 몇 장 링크합니다. ***

National Geographic Homepage
http://www.nationalgeographic.com

글:Mike Edwards Photographs 사진:Michael Yamashita

The storied Venetian trader escapes bandits, rampaging rivers, and sandstorms to reach the border of far-off China in this first of three articles.

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

By now, I estimate, the Polos had traveled at least 5,000 miles (8,050 kilometers). Marco speaks of delays on account of rain, snow, and swollen rivers, explaining in part why it took three and a half years to reach China. They may also have lost time because Marco was ill. One version of his book says that in Badakhshan Marco “remained sick for about a year.” What might his illness have been? Malaria is a good guess. If that’s what it was, it finally ran its course, for once more the Polos were on their way, following a road that went “upwards by a river.”

That would be the Warduj, boiling through rapids below the track we followed. We were in another battered pickup truck, driven by a fellow named Agha. What I most remember about Agha is the smile perpetually creasing his beard, even as he forced his precious truck over rocks as if it were invincible. Every half hour or so he stopped to refill the radiator.

At about 9,000 feet (2,750 meters) the Warduj became a gentle stream braided across a wide valley of lush grass. Over the centuries thousands of caravans have camped in that idyllic place, and I have no doubt that the Polos stayed a couple of days to rest their animals. Then they rode across a low rise to the Pyandzh, as the upper Amu Darya is known, and followed that river into the valley that Marco called Vocan.

Sweltering heat in Bandar-e Abbas, a port city in Iran, sends a fisherman’s son into the shallows of the Strait of Hormuz. The Polos may have traveled to this shore to find a boat to take them to China. Wrote Marco in The Description of the World: “Their ships are very bad and many of them are lost because they are not nailed with iron pins.” The Polos chose to turn around and brave a crossing of the Dasht-e Lut, the “desert of emptiness.”

Marco Polo probably slept in a place like this way station for caravans in Feyzabad, Afghanistan. Merchants load salt onto their donkeys, having paid the equivalent of 12 cents an animal for a night in the stables. Humans stay for free. Always on the alert for trade goods, Marco remarked on the large deposits of salt in the area. He also noted the rich veins of silver and lapis lazuli. As for the taverns, the clientele was rough, he remarked, but the wine was tasty.

One of the world’s largest cruise ships, the 951-foot (290-meter) Grand Princess, draws a crowd at Venice’s Piazza San Marco. The two pillars were standing more than 700 years ago when the Polos sailed from Venice. Their small trading party switched from boat to caravan once it reached the shores of present-day Israel. From Acre the Polos went south to Jerusalem to pick up holy oil to bring to the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan in his capital Shandu, north of what is now Beijing, China.

But as the Polos plodded on, rivers and oases became scarce and sand dunes rose ever higher, until they looked like mountains. The toughest stretch of their desert journey was at hand, where “nothing to eat is found” and “you must always go a day and a night before you find water.” The Polos loaded a month’s supply of food for themselves and their animals. They probably hired a couple of cameleers to help with their pack string, and perhaps they joined a caravan of traders who knew the location of water holes.

There is a sensuous allure in the curving, swelling architecture of dunes. They are also deceitful. One day I was sure I saw a great lake ahead, with boats. Just mirages, of course. But a traveler half-crazed by thirst could go fatally astray while pursuing such a vision. Marco wrote of spirits that could lure away a straggler, calling him by name in voices that sounded like his companions’. “It often seems to you that you hear many instruments sounding,” he also wrote, “and especially drums.”

Practical men say these eerie sounds are produced by moving sand or by wind in the dunes. “The old people believe they are hearing devils speak,” said a farmer at an oasis. He rejected this as superstition but confessed, “One night I heard, three times, a terrible noise, like crying, like someone dying.”

I went to this oasis, named Nanhu, with a small, indefatigable historian, Li Zhengyu. We traveled together for about two weeks while I soaked up his encyclopedic knowledge of the Silk Road. “The Polos certainly stopped to water here,” he said at Nanhu’s springs, conjuring a picture of Marco leading camels to drink. And then Professor Li led me to the ruins of a town, almost buried in dunes. To judge by the visible walls, it had been about the size of two football fields. “This was Shou Chang Cheng, an outpost of the Han dynasty that was mentioned in records in 110 B.C.,” he said. “Marco Polo must have spent the night within these walls—there was no other town for miles.”

By now the Polos had traveled perhaps 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) in China—about half the way to Shangdu—and had put the dreaded Taklimakan behind them. In what is now Gansu province they reached Shazhou, a hub of trade routes, and Marco entered a new world, mingling for the first time with large numbers of Chinese, as well as Mongols and a local people related to the Tibetans, the Tanguts. Most, Marco wrote, were “idolaters. . . . they have many abbeys and many monasteries which are all full of idols of many kinds, to which they do great sacrifice and great honor.” Shazhou, now named Dunhuang, was one of China’s greatest Buddhist centers.

Marco Polo traveled here, crossing the Yongding River southwest of Beijing. “Ten horsemen can well go there the one beside the other,” he wrote of the original stone bridge. Rebuilt in the 17th century, the span is known as the Marco Polo Bridge, commemorating the traveler often called “China’s favorite foreigner.” Marco’s book, The Description of the World, based on his years in China from 1275 to 1291, presented the stunning news that the world’s largest cities and richest resources were located not in Europe, as his audience assumed, but in the far-off Orient.

Compact version of the caravans that took Marco Polo across China’s fearsome Taklimakan Desert, a sure-footed donkey and Bactrian camel carry a traveler through a rare snowstorm outside the town of Kashgar in Xinjiang. More than two arduous years into his journey from Venice to the east coast of China, Polo was spooked by the desert wilderness. He heard mysterious whisperings in the dune fields and noises like “many instruments sounding.” He attributed the sounds to “spirits” who were thought to lead travelers off the path to their death.

Village women mobilize near the oasis of Hotan in Xinjiang to plant a windbreak of poplars. Many of the caravan stops Marco mentioned on his route across the deserts of western China are now buried. Tree planting numbered among the many virtues Marco ascribed to Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler whose empire covered most of China. Kublai ordered that trees must border all the roadways in his realm so that, Marco wrote, travelers “may not lose the way.”

There were, of course, skeptics, unable to believe even Marco’s truthful reports, of cities in China grander than Europe’s, of a rock that burned and cloth that did not. A contemporary wrote that Marco defended his text even as he lay dying in 1324, age about 70. To friends who begged him to recant before he met his God, he replied: I did not write half of what I saw.

At his death he possessed a golden paitzu and a princess’s headpiece with “precious stones and pearls”—a gift from the Blue Princess, perhaps?

It took about 80 years for the geographic knowledge Marco collected to begin showing up on Europe’s rudimentary maps. John Larner, a historian at the University of Glasgow and author of a new eval‎uation of Marco’s influence, explains the delay like this: “Imagine yourself a mapmaker and you pick up Marco Polo’s book and you say, ‘Right, here’s this chap telling us about places on the other side of the world, but how am I going to translate all that to a map?’ For one thing, you haven’t got any longitude and latitude.”

But gradually Marco’s place-names began to appear: such Chinese ports as Quinsai and Zaiton, plus Cipangu, Java, Sumatra, Ceylon, Zanzibar.

“Never before or since has one man given such an immense body of new geographic knowledge to the West,” John Larner concludes. Not in the seven centuries since his book appeared, I think, has Marco received an accolade more resounding.

After a night of setting nets, Indonesian fishermen form a towline to take them through the shallow waters of an estuary on the north coast of Sumatra. Sailing toward home—Venice—after 17 years in China, Marco Polo languished on this coast for five months while waiting for favorable winds. Fear of cannibals prompted his crew to build a crude stockade on the beach where they camped. From Sumatra, Marco brought back news of a strange creature he called a “unicorn,” otherwise known as a rhinoceros.

A rupee or two—less than five cents—buys a cloud of incense from a peddler working a fetid slum in Mumbai (Bombay), India. In his book, The Description of the World, Marco rarely mentioned the lower classes. In fact, he was maddeningly silent about many things, including the activities of his father and uncle, who accompanied him throughout his 24-year odyssey. The biggest mystery is what happened to the 600 people who left China with the Polos in a fleet of 14 vessels. Marco simply says that only 18 were still alive by the time he reached Persia. Shipwreck? Epidemic? Marco didn’t tell.

Unmoved by the urgency of traffic in the Gujarat city of Bahvnagar, cows enjoy their status as objects of worship in Indian life. Hindu beliefs and practices fascinated Marco, especially the refusal of people to eat beef and the choice of some holy men to “go quite naked.”

Though Marco lived for another 30 years after his return to Venice in 1295, he retired as a world traveler. His adventures did not end, however. Possibly enlisted to help defend Venice in its sea battles with arch rival Genoa, Marco was taken prisoner by Genoese forces. During his confinement in Genoa, Marco composed the famous book of his travels. Freed in 1299, Marco returned to Venice and made an unspectacular living as a businessman and celebrity author. Many of his contemporaries dismissed Marco’s tales as fantasy. Yet over time much of his information has proved accurate. His book and the maps it influenced inspired generations of explorers who set out to find, as Marco did, “the greatest marvels and…diversities” of the wide world.

[선과]

귀국하는교? ㅎㅎ

[幽玄]

이렇게 사진 잘찍는 넘들 보면 짜증난다... 내가 못하는 거 넘들이 너무 잘할 때... ㅋㅋㅋ

[보견심]

어쩌자고 이렇게 영어를 쫙 깔으셨대요? 무식이 부끄러워서...

[해심]

나도 유현오빠랑 동감..사진 쥑이네.