Freelance Photography : Bertrand Celce

Americana

Dorris, CA

A story of bus shelters

1

This serie is about an architectural oddity that you can come across in the Russian back country : bus shelters. Many of them date from the Soviet era and seem to be architectural exercices with various styles. Sorry for the often off-focus pictures which have been shot while driving along. No information about the exact location, these pics were gathered while doing extensive driving through central Russia and the Kuban.

More Parking Lots (Fukuoka, Kyushu)

Ilot de lumière

Here is yet another photographic essay dealing with parking lots in Japan, which I think bring at certain hours of the day a very inspiring experience. This is a country where foreigners usually visit temples and sanctuary. I occasionally do as well but Japanese cities are so different from what my references are that things that are usually off the map for visitors become for me visual excitement and kick off further inspiration through my camera or my phone. These few images were shot during random walks through Fukuoka, Kyushu.

Statues from the cold

Lenin speaking to the empty frost Unknown Soviet sculptor, 1958-originally standing in Csepel

There's a place in Budapest that should be visited exclusively in the coldest days of winter, that's the enclosed area where the imported soviet regimes's statues were relegated, not in faraway Magadan but just where they kind of belonged, on Balatoni út in a non descript suburb on the outskirts of Buda. I've been there in the warmer months but somehow it's so more inspiring in the coldest days of winter, first because it's so cold that there are barely other visitors, you have the whole stalag for yourself, and also because the frost give these statues another dimension and echo. We're speaking of the cold, isn't it ? figuratively and physically down to the bones you feel you really touch the reality behind these statues. Here are a few of those statues frozen in time, there are many more there, just to give you the feel...

Osaka parking lots

Orderly sleep

Here is a follow-up on a photographic essay I started long time ago. Japan's parking architecture and ergonomy tell a lot about many things, and many Japanese will feel home when looking at these still scenes. You have to be in japan to realize how the subtilities of a culture can be sensed in the delicate arrangements of private parking, fitting sometimes in just a few square meters squeezed between two buildings.. Tell me how you design your parking lots, I'll tell you who you are...

Kazinczy street Synagogue (Budapest)

Kazinczy utca Synagogue

Budapest, Hungary
These are a few pictures I shot with my casual-use camera Fujifilm X30 in a little-known synagogue of Budapest, the Kazinczy utca [street] Orthodox Synagogue (Kazinczy utca zsinagóga). Although I have stayed repeatedly in this enjoyable city, I never visited the main synagogue during my free time, maybe because that's such a tourist hotspot (and I stay away from mass tourism as much as I can). I discovered this smaller synagogue by chance, possibly on my way to Szimpla, and it's a rare gem for its architectural and interior decoration. While I'm not someone spending much time in museums, churches and temples, i can understand why some of these places make you feel special, and the Kazinczy synagogue is such a special place.
Hungary doesn't enjoy a very good press abroad for some reason, I mean in Western Europe and the West in general, and I've read awful things on the country in newspapers that were considered reliable in the past, stories (or rather pamphlets) where you end up with the impression of a country bubbling with antisemitism, it's pretty sad, Budapest is certainly among the safest in Europe for jews, and unlike France, England, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Sweden (Sweden !) or even New York, recognizable jews can walk along the streets without fearing for their safety. When a similarly biased newspaper ends up addressing the issue of violent attacks against jews in Western Europe (like here), it does everything it can, dancing around the issue, to avoid naming the elephant in the room behind this hatred and tries to mislead the reader (but everyone living there knows what is going on). But anyway all this divisive media noise about Budapest fades away when you spend some time in this city, and special places like this one help. This orthodox synagogue was badly damaged during WW2 (an era when most of the local jews were deported and killed) and later restored to its former glory, with painted Art Nouveau patterns on the walls, ceiling and columns. It is often empty, don't miss it, the visit cost only 1000 Forits or 3 €.
Directions for the Kazinczy utca Synagogue

Light and silence

Crossroads

These pictures are about visual scenes, light, silence (often), architecture and they yield a state of mind only found when you engage in a road trip with no precise aim in view, certainly the best way to travel in this world. Camping in Mother Nature is the best way to travel on earth, travel light with no cement or junk between you and the stars. I learned to love this freedom when I used to travel on a bicycle, like the late Bernard Moitessier did on the seas. His travel philosophy was centered on simplicity, and this spirit should be taught to kids :

Faire de la simplicité un art de vivre pour aller à l’essentiel et garder sa liberté.
« Petit bateau, petit problème, grand bateau, grand problème. »

« Il y a différentes philosophies pour naviguer. La mienne s’attache à faire au plus simple, pour être paré à prendre la mer dans les plus brefs délais et à moindre frais. »

Il est nécessaire de pouvoir réparer soi-même, d’éviter la dépendance à des moyens financiers qu’il n’a pas ou à une technique qu’il ne maîtrise pas. Il déploie de nombreuses astuces et systèmes de débrouille à la vietnamienne : chambres à air, lance-pierre…et fait de la récupération un art de s’équiper et d’éviter la consommation.
Rechercher la simplicité, c’est aussi, selon l’adage de son ami Henry Wakelam : « Un travail ne peut être considéré comme bon, que lorsqu’on ne peut pas faire plus simple. »

Tel Aviv architecture

Moshe Mordechai st 1

Tel Aviv is a modern city that hides its charm behind dusty streets, and rather than following one of these architecture tours I can't but suggest to visiors to just walk randomly through the city, even going into streets that aren't on the tours' list because suprises are at every corner. The other reason is that these dusty box buildings that were certainly built in hurry in the late 1940s' and 1950s' also deserve interest, they're not just the equivalent here of soviet-era architecture but they also perspire this middle-eastern relaxed feel where perople don't care too much of aesthetics.

The French novelist Pierre Loti who travelled extensively in the East [Orient] wrote somewhere that the Orient begins where people stop maintaining buildings and there's some truth in this, we in the West put an oversized emphasis on real estate as these bricks and stones were part of ourselves while in the East people have a more relaxed approach. That's my interpretation of why buildings are often dusty and messy in Tel Aviv, you can see all kind of stuff on balconies and walls, flags, posters, empty flowerpots, AC units, anything, and that's part of the charm, I hope the gentrification of the town with all these expensive buildings will spare the dusty mess or Tel Aviv would loose some thing authentic.

These random pictures give you a glimpse of what Tel Aviv looks like for real, you have of course lots of Bauhaus marvels that have been renovated but also older buildings and other, dusty and more vulgar ones that were clearly just built hastily with the quality of cement that was then available.

Nationale 7

Gendarme in the traffic jam

Tourves, Var (Provence)
There's an inflation of summer events and festival in France, going from classical music to theater, jazz, gastronomy and it's been hard for mayors and their administration to find a niche in these summer cultural activities that has not yet been experimented. For small villages that can't compete with the lavish funds spent by larger cities (from taxpayers money, that is), it's a real challenge. But Tourves, a village located in the back country of the Var département found a cheap way out of it : re-enact every other year the old days when (before any divided highway were built) the National 7 was connecting Paris to Menton on the French Riviera. In summer Parisians would rush to the Mediterranean with their family, driving all the way down in dense traffic and a tumultuous but candid vacation euphoria. You could expect big traffic jams in bottleneck villages with their narrow main streets as there were no detour roads around cities & villages. Tourves wanted to make this all alive again, this is Le Bouchon de Tourves (the traffic jam of Tourves), with all the vintage cars available, the good mood, the mess, leaded-gazoline smell, unbridled honking and even a gendarme to try put some order in this chaos...

If you come visit Tourves for this enjoyable and non-pretentious event, you might need some calm after that mess, as well as clean air : go walk and enjoy the solitude at the remote Chapel saint Probace, no car (even vintage) will bother you over here. Bring some bread, saucisson and cool rosé in a thermos.

Random Tokyo shots

Crossing with view in Mejiro

Shadows. Kanda station