SUMMERTIME and the living is easy. On the first day of March I’d like to share these pictures with you. They were taken on an early morning somewhere in Anglet, France. It was the last day of a surftrip and with those sunrays you know it’s going to be a beautiful day.

BEFORE tourists flocked at the base of the great pyramid, writer Gustave Flaubert and photographer Maxime Du Camp made a journey through Egypt. In 1849 and 1850 they visited all the great monuments, like the pyramids of Giza and the ancient settlements of Luxor. The pyramids were at that time just sleepy piles of stones instead of the epicenter of a tourist industry. Some of the monuments were even half covered with sand. Considering it was just ten years after the invention of photography, Du Camp did a very impressive job.

SHUFFLE the street. That is what I have done with these four images.  A couple of pictures taken on the same spot form together a new reality. The camera clicked in Paris, New York, Singapore and Brussels.

FEBRUARY is a grim month. Winter is settled in our system and spring is still far away. In March you have days that give hope. You can feel the change of seasons in the air. But such days don’t exist in February. Be prepared for grey skies, rain and wet snow. But, as Steinbeck once said, ‘What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness’. The first picture shows the Snake River in the Grand Teton National Park in the United States. Ansel Adams took the photo. After that there is the shot of a building in Milan by photographer Max Natkiel. Bill Brandt made the last one of Top Withens. ........................................................ ........................................................

IF Mahatma Gandhi was a cabbie in New Delhi before he stood up against the British he probably never came up with the strategy of non-violence resistance. Because driving through a busy metropolis all day takes its toll. It doesn’t matter how peaceful a cab driver is, somewhere during his shift he gets frustrated by other motorist or nagging costumers. Magnum photographer Costa Manos took in 1961 these slides of a New York taxicab driver that surely had enough.

MASKS don’t only change your appearance, but sometimes also your personality. At least it did for this man in the fishing village near Porthierville in the Belgian Congo. I don’t know for what kind of ritual this mask was used, but it certainly looks convincing to me. Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys took the picture in 1959.

SUMMERTIME and the living is easy. Especially on top of the Sheraton Motor Inn, near the Hudson in Manhattan. Photographer Andreas Feininger pointed his camera eastwards when he took this picture. The book is called ‘New York’. Feininger made the photos, Kate Simon wrote the text. It is the second printing, the first one was published in1964.

YOU can sculpt with marble, clay or paper mache. But why not sculpt your skull? In Africa they know to make the most of hair. Since 1968 Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere roams the streets, searching for eccentric coiffures. He takes photos from the rear of the head, in profile and sometimes head on. The collection he made consist of close to a thousand photographs of the hairdos of African woman. Ojeikere calls it the Hairstyle Series. In his view the hairstyles are an art form. I guess he’s right, although architecture is sometimes also a good word.

WHEN you step on terrain no men have entered before, it’s hard to resist the urge to push the button of your camera again and again. An astronaut from an Apollo mission couldn’t, he just clicked constantly. The result you see below. The cross hairs you see on the photos are called a reseau grid. They are produced by a glass plate within the camera, between the lens and film. The reseau grid is used to establish a geometrical basis for measuring objects in photographs. The pictures are made with the Hasselblad 500EL. All the Apollo missions used Hasselblad camera’s to capture the moments on the moon. It was not the only high end good from Europe where NASA relied on. Each astronaut also wore an Omega Caliber .321 Speedmaster Professional on the lunar surface.

THE pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. Well, in this case it is a guitar. The operator of the ‘fascistkillingmachine’ is American folk legend Woody Guthrie. In the early forties Guthrie was a member of the Almanac Singers. The group played in those war years anti-fascist songs.  He is also known for his autobiography Bound for Glory. Recently one of his songs was used in a car commercial.