Travel Mandalas

"Travel Mandalas", 50 years of travelling around the world, illustrated with Photoshop Montages.

Mandala is of Hindu origin but is also used in a Buddhist context to refer to various tangible objects. Mandalas, have a geometric pattern.

"We would love to travel the way Françoise Callier does, with open eyes, and none of the trappings of itineraries or organized tours. She plots her own path, with curiosity and generosity for guides. People she meets are entitled to treasures of attention and empathy, and her natural compassion fosters sympathy in return. Friends may worry over her destinations, but Françoise feels no apprehension over rough conditions far off the beaten track. Discovery outweighs adventure, though she's perfectly able to weight risks and contingencies. If she ever experienced fear, we'll never know it. Her only interest is others, and their shared experience makes her an advocate of their cause at a time so many indigenous people face the threat of losing not only their habitats and livelihoods, but their very souls as well.

Françoise composes her images with modern technology, freedom of imagination, and the compassion of memory. She crystallizes images that the tiniest motion of the kaleidoscope would irremediably dissipate. In this respect, she provides a response to a modern anguish, namely the need for signs of recognition in our agitated, complicated lives. Symmetry is not always the rule: an ice floe off Greenland can be mirrored in the Arctic Ocean, conveying a forceful sense of strength, solitude and polar light. A Bolivian girl holding a cat in her arms occupies a mirror of strange machines. And we can say, "Así es la Vida," for herself and children everywhere, bewildered by the complexity surrounding them, and the uncertainty of the future that lies ahead. By contrast, the Kogi Indians of Colombia seem to call back and forth, but their call goes unheard, even when one is multiplied fourfold; as part of a group of outcasts calling with a single voice, each is unique but all are perfectly identical with respect to the injustice of their fate. The ostriches of Namibia require no mirror images; no need to hide their head in the sand or look into a mirror, because they still reign in their desert--if only for the time being, judging from the border, which could equally be a frame or an enclosure. There is evidently nothing mechanical in these compositions; the scenes are subtly composed, at a slight remove from reality, with a dose of humor, poetry and charm. Hindu aesthetes gaze from under Cola-Cola signs, and American eagles turn endlessly, above an almighty power that may have lost its ability to observes the sky. We experience the abstraction of Balinese rice paddies, or the altiplano of the Andes, whence all traces of human presence has almost vanished. Journeys can collide, as memories fuse when our valiant voyager comes face to face with penguins emerging from a mirage over the Libyan desert. The thirst in Ghadamis must have been fierce, for penguins to come to the rescue. Whenever borders are present, they round out the tale, underscore the context, or evoke the precariousness of the scene, while holding the elements in place." - Frédéric Mitterrand