Hands

I’ve been putting together a selection of images for a themed competition. These five images showing people’s hands won’t be in the final selection but I do like them and so thought they were worth posting to the blog. The theme of the competition is, loosely, “people”. You can tell a lot about a person by their hands of course. And these hands in particular give away a lot about the people they belong to.

I was pleased with the picture of the woman praying because it seems to say a lot about her religious devotion without even showing her face. Hands tattooed with henna are something you can see often in India although I was pleased to find a lady wearing a sari with such wonderfully sympathetic colours. Those reds and oranges really go with the henna. The man pouring sweet Jalebi mix into hot oil didn’t seem to be doing a roaring trade although he was wearing the grubbiest t-shirt in the whole of India so perhaps he wasn’t a great advert. The old man’s hands, placed on his knees like that, were an obvious subject although he seemed slightly bemused by my request to photograph his cigar. He shrugged his agreement and kept perfectly still, even, I suspect, holding his breath. Sometimes being a strange foreigner can be an advantage. Lastly, the lady’s hand on the photo on the right is holding out an offering of flower heads. She was selling small newspaper parcels of flowers to devotees at the Pushkar Camel Fair. Pilgrims would pay a couple of rupees for the flowers, take them to a nearby ghat and release them onto the water.

So, let’s hear it for hands. In fact, let’s give our five-fingered friends a big…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Competitions, My work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.