The Earth seen from the sky by Yann
Arthus-Bertrand
-Sophie BARRAU, France
The French photographer Yann-Bertrand shows us the earth seen from the sky.
His exhibition is like a gallery of paintings. It gives pleasure and emotion all around.
Yet, when people speak of, Arthus exclaims," why do people always want to add the
word 'artist' to make it sound more chic"?
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| Colonies
de fous de Bassan sur I'ile d'Edley en Islande |
Let us begin with few figures: 5 years of work, 75 countries, 2,000 hours of
flying plus 100,000 slides. The result of Yann Arthus vast project matches the scale of
his determination and his passion. The photographer shows us 120 open air photos that he
has selected and developed in a very large format. A few examples of what he shows us from
the sky include a coral reef in Australia, a glacier pouring down into the ocean in
Argentina, a flock if ibises above the Orinico, a huge market of multicolored carpets, the
Yankee stadium in New York and the Arguin bank, a slender sand bar on the Arcachon basin.
There is a long list of them and there is such a variety of different photos that they
offer a striking sight in their renewal and multitude. Yann-Arthus does not seek to show
us a specifically splendid and ideal world. He photographs all kind of reality and also
shows us the earthquake in Turkey, a refugee camp in Kossovars in Albania and a rubbish
dump in Mexico. "I like to photograph everything. Everything interests me. I want to
do things that are true, that's all. I always photograph in a simple way, trying to remain
authentic. What interests me is the truthand to show things as they are," Arthus
explains. What he likes is to give information and feel useful to others. His photos
exhibited are all accompanied by an explanatory text. He does not imagine his photos
without a caption even when they are just postcards. "I didn't write the texts. I was
simply there with my camera. Do not look for anything other than the message that the
earth is beautiful and that is what interests me as it does you. I am just link between
people and earth and I came at the right time with the right photos. That's all I
am". Yann has just a simple style. "I notice that I always put what is beautiful
in the middle. It is rare for me to reframe a photo. It is my way of working. That's how
it is. I take a few shots, some postcards. I put the Eiffel Tower in the middle. That's
all. I saw a paper written about the golden triangle with my photos…It was about the
way to make a picture using a diagonal. There are always people who seek to dissect the
picture". Yann Arthus pits no distance between the signifier and the signified in the
photo. He seeks to seize the reality and then to show it in its raw state. " Today,
there are photographers who say, "no, I am not a photographer, I'm an artist, that is
to say I am someone who goes beyond photography and who tries to show something"'.
I'm just simply a photographer. That is all I am. For me it is enough and there is no use
adding photojournalism and artist to give oneself greater value. Being an artist or not,
art and all that, is not really an important discussion and I don't think that it is
degrading to say that one is not an artist. Yann does not consider his work any less for
that. "'It does not mean that I'm not a good photographer. I am not necessarily a
modest person. I think that I am a very good photographer but there is an artistic
dimension that I don't have". Humility is something that he feels when looking at
nature". "I am filled with wonder at the sight of the earth. When you see a hand
move like that you say to yourself, "but it's magical". We can't even manage to
reproduce it in a machine. It's extraordinary. When I see photo of the blue planet taken
from the space shuttle, I think that thing on which we live are sublime.
A green photo Caledonian forest in the shape of a heart is Yann's best known
photo, the cover of his book and the emblem of his project. "The earth seen from the
sky", published by Editons de La Martiniere, has been translated into 7 languages and
600,000 copies have already been sold.
"'The more I exhibit, the happier I'm. The exhibitions are organized and
financed by me and my team. I have everything in boxes and crates. I just love it"!
He expresses himself joyfully and leaves an impression of peaceful generosity behind.
"I would love to have a gallery in Paris and make my own books and posters which I
would sell directly to people. I, who work in the airy sphere, would sometimes like to be
close to the people.
The Poverty of Perestroika
-Yuba Raj Koirala, Kathmandu
Having assumed the position of the General Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev then set out to reform the
Union under the twin banner of Perestroika and Glasnost and remained committed to it until
he became unable to keep up with the pace of events brought about by the reform process.
Perestroika entailed restructuring whilst Glasnost entailed openness or publicity.
It has been argued that the reason for such a radical change was economic,
nonetheless it was later to affect the ideological plane as a whole thus bringing the cold
war to an end and finally disintegrating the Soviet Union itself.
From the outset Gorbachev seemed to accept the fact that the problem of the
Soviet economy and its society lay not just in the personal shortcoming of his
predecessors but rather in the operation of the Soviet system itself. Thus he sought to
reform the Soviet Union 'within the context of the socialist system as existed in the
USSR'. Although Perestroika did not at first imply changes in the political system, it was
clear that economic reform and a new model of socialism was 'conceivable only in the
association with democratization of the political system'. The success and failure of
Perestroika may therefore be viewed 'within a broader political and historical context',
and the issue involved in determining its future were the 'democratization of public life
and a radical reform of the economy'. Perestroika, however was 'a more ambiguous concept
since it betokened change without specifying the pace of change or defining the new system
into which the old system was to be changed'.
Gorbachev seemed well aware even before coming to power that the world was
entering a new era of free market economy, multinationalism, and liberal thinking which
were fused so closely he became convinced that the individuals were looking for ways to
proceed more through personal choice and less through restriction. Domestically the Soviet
Union was facing various problems. Slow economic growth, declining national growth,
decrease in living standard, rising alcohol consumption, growing drug abuse, growing child
mortality, lower life expectancy, environmental degradation 'leading to a gradual erosion
of the ideological and moral values of the society'. Elements of so called 'stagnation and
other phenomena alien to socialism began to appear in the life of the society'.
Such was the critical state of the Soviet society, the question was raised
whether it could still compare itself with those countries once considered to be the Third
World, mainly, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. By and large the Soviet Union was losing a
race with the West too, unable to present a viable attractive option to market capitalism
and democracy. Conscious of these facts, Gorbachev genuinely sought to address this new
emerging trends and accommodate the Soviet Union in the 21st centuries development 'well
prepared and sure that there will be further progress', with free enterprises economy and
democratically governed society.
With regard to the political reform and democratization of the public life,
it required an active mass participation in the election, secret ballot box, popular
nomination and a thoroughly reformed electoral system. By these means Gorbachev hoped to
deliver to his people a concept of "Socialist State" and also to put the people
back on the track.
Unfortunately, before he could go along this line he was faced with a problem
of having to reform the communist party itself. Not surprisingly, he found the party that
he belonged to and from where he sought to reform his country was itself non-reformable.
Although a reformist minority in the party supported him, he also faced a majority
opposition who were not ready for such a radical change fearing the loss of power and
privileges. He therefore had to work against the prevailing sentiments of the majority,
replacing the leading personnel with conservative thinking, altering the party and state
structures, changing their names and functions, introducing new electoral procedures and
creating new bodies.
The 19th party conference in 1988 decided that all party posts up to the
level of the Central Committee should be filled by secret and competitive ballot and that
no one should hold the same post for more than two consecutive five-year terms. The staff
of the Central Committee was reduced in size (from 20 to 9 departments and a 30% cut in
personnel). In February 1990 the Central Committee accepted Gorbachev's proposal that the
party should abandon its guaranteed leading role and that the Article 6 of the Soviet
constitution should be amended or removed. The party members were also made more
accountable above and below and their privileges reduced. In the process, friction began
to grow between the party members. Some went on strike doubting their ability to guide the
whole life of the society as they had done in the past and others began to resign. However
tough the struggle within the party apparatus had been Gorbachev finally managed to drag
the central committee into the reform process and pushed it ahead. Needless to say it made
thousands of party members resentful who showed little interest in the reform programme.
Gorbachev insisted that Perestroika could not be achieved without Glasnost
and Glasnost entailed not only inroads on censorship and habits of subservience but also
reform of the entire political system, including the abolition of the communist party's
monopoly of power and its control over the institutions of the state and the machinery of
the economy.
Perestroika did not mean to alter the Soviet foreign policy, however,
Gorbachev could not take further steps without normalizing the relationship with the West
and more particularly with the United States. He then made a number of proposals to the
American government and dragged them to the table of negotiation for the reduction of
arms. President Reagan on the other hand had come to office with the popular slogan of
"focus on evil empire in the modern world " and was known as an 'outspoken enemy
of communism the world over'. Suspicious though, the Americans had always been behind the
Soviet motives, President Reagan however, was a 'great believer in the power of personal
relations to overcome set ideological positions'. He came to share the view that Gorbachev
was a new kind of Soviet leader with whom it would be possible to negotiate on a more
trusting basis. The signing of the INF treaty in this regard set the seal on the new
US-Soviet relationship. The Soviet Union withdrew her troops from Afghanistan and also cut
the aid to the 3rd World countries since propping them up was very costly and told them to
seek help from somewhere else.
Soviet Union abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine and replaced it by so called
Sinatra Doctrine which allowed the satellite countries of the Eastern Europe to do their
way and not to follow the Soviet model blindly. This in turn brought down the communist
regime of those countries one after another by popular revolutionary movement. The events
which took place in the Eastern Communist countries made a dramatic impact in the Soviet
republics and added fuel to the flame to what by then has already become a question of
nationality in the Soviet Union.
As Gorbachev was breaking new grounds at home and abroad with his reform
programme and witnessed cautious progress in the field of agriculture and small private
business, he also witnessed a nationalist and ethnic unrest, mainly in the Baltic
republic, where the demand for autonomy grew stronger. The ethnic conflict was later to
present a serious threat to Gorbachev's reforms because ' they were likely to provoke a
conservative backlash against the greater freedom from central party control which lay at
the heart of his Perestroika'.
As the event began to unfold in the Soviet Union, discount began to mount.
People began to free themselves demanding more freedom followed by a number of
demonstrations. Gorbachev believed that by gathering more power he could keep situation
under control and eventually got himself elected as the president of the Soviet Union. It
changed the structure of the Central Committee and Article 6 of the constitution came
under such a heavy attack that it needed to be abandoned and 'the Soviet Union seemed too
be on the threshold of permitting multi party democracy'. Yet for Gorbachev 'the
preservation of the communist party as the one cohesive element binding the Union
together, remained a crucial objective. No matter how committed he remained until the last
minute to preserving its integrity it was his tragedy that he became unable to control the
force he had unleashed.
Gorbachev did not want to dismantle Marxism-Leninism of which he himself
seemed to have been proud of. All he wanted to do was to recycle the Soviet Communism and
bring it back with a more human face; at first by reforming the economy and secondly
democratizing the whole society. He hoped the Soviet Union could still play its role as a
super power in a new context and keep the West and its rival super power, the United
States at arms length. But the tide of history was against him. In his own word 'Wishful
thinking is a most dangerous occupation ' so was Perestroika. |
