Photography; I shoot what I like, and sometimes people like what I shoot. All photos are copyright to Michael C. Lam unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Several weeks ago my Deck photo was an exterior photograph of the Saint Barnabas Anglican Church. That church is now in the process of being demolished, but luckily, I got to take some photographs of the interior just before that. I happened to be on the outside of the church doing some more exterior shots with the wide-angle lens when I was approached by another local photographer, Amanda Richards, recent winner of the local chapter of the PAHO Safe Motherhood Photography Contest, she was awaiting the priest to open the church for the Deconsecration Ceremony. So fate stepped in, and I got to go inside the church to photograph parts of it before all the items were removed.
This photograph was pure luck! I was facing the altar taking a photograph, when I saw the area lighten around me, on turning around, a man was opening the doors at the back and just at that moment Ms Marjorie Kirkpatrick walked across the aisle. And there it was, one of my favourite photos of the set.
I called the photograph “Final Entrance Opening”, referring to the doors themselves and to the final service to be held there.
I will do a later blog-post on the rest of photos from that set. 🙂 I promise.
I’ve been delinquent in my posts recently, but I have a really really good excuse…. no I don’t, I’ve just been busy. I can’t even conjure up a plausible excuse that might fool a school teacher on this one.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the past and the future, for this post I’ll deal with the past. As you know I recently posted a photo of St Barnabas, a church that will soon be just a memory, and in my case a few thousand pixels worth of data, and on a recent walk with Nikhil (during which I think I accomplished a grand total of three shutter actuations) I took a photo of a piece of architecture that always fascinated me, for one reason and one reason only, the tower!
I’ve always dreamt of having a tower on my dwelling that I could climb into and see the world around me, and since I’ve taken up photography, probably capture amazing sunset and sunrise photographs from it. Of course, I don’t have any such tower or photographer’s perch, so I just admire the ones that exist.
Of course, this building also has other “architectural” interests, like the Demerara Shutters, the wooden louvres and the shingled outer wall.
Partial remains of the Globe Cinema, demolished this year, 2011
It recently dawned on me that there may be only one functional cinema left in Georgetown, possibly only one left in Guyana. While the television and computers, handheld media players and the internet have certainly impacted on how we watch our movies, the cinema has always had a big draw for people, however the cinemas in Guyana have steadily gone into disrepair and certainly some have disappeared. While we can place a lot of blame of the modernisation of media viewing, the owners and promoters of our cinemas have to take some of the blame, even when I was much younger, and the cinemas were full of moviegoers, I remember the sordid states of the seats, the persevering smell of urine, and the sound of the rodents running around the aisles.
Starlite Cinema, Pouderoyn, West Bank Demerara. Closed and abandoned
They never did the little things that made you WANT to go to the cinema, why suffer through all that when you could wait a few months and see it in the comfort of your home? It was the experience, it was the “event” of going to the cinema with family or friends to watch a new (or old) movie in the company of others there to enjoy the experience, the camaraderie, the joy of the big silver screen, unfortunately the experience was not always a good one. And the cinemas are disappearing, one by one, by one…
The Astor Cinema, still functional as of this year, but attendance makes it hard for the proprietor to keep it up.
I was re-reading an article written by Godfrey Chin on the Rise and Fall of Guyana’s Cinemas, I believe this was part of his “Nostalgias”, and while I am not old enough to know of some of the cinemas or even the movies he mentions, it hits home. He, of course, goes back to even before we gained our Independence, back to the days of British Guiana, and he brings us into the modern era, where instead of Cinemas modernising to keep up, they just kept going, stagnated in time, except for the titles of the movie releases 🙂
What prompted this blog-post was the sudden nostalgia I got (I am probably getting like Godfrey) when I was processing a photo I took of the partly demolished “Globe Cinema” and an image of the abandoned Starlite Cinema. Both of those images are included in this post. As the Astor is the last remaining cinema, I think that I should make an effort to get permission to do some photography in that establishment before it too disappears.
Formerly the Strand Cinema, now the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God
There are at least two other Cinemas that I know of which have been converted into places of worship, it seems to be the thing to do 🙂
Click on each image to see them larger in their respective galleries.
Earlier this week I saw a Facebook Note from a local Journalist, Neil Marks, about the St Barnabas Church being sold, I always find it sad when any place of worship is sold, even more so when there is historic significance to the site (as is the case with most of them as they usually go back several generations).
Nikhil and I took a walk there hoping to find it open, we really wanted to get inside. As it was closed, we settled for taking a few more photos of the exterior from outside the fence. I went to the website of the National Trust of Guyana looking for more information on the site and found that there was pitiful little there.
This week was busy, I got more photographs than usual 🙂 I have quite a number that I would love to use as the photo for The 2010 Deck this week, but I have to choose one, so after some thought I chose one that I am unlikely to replicate anytime soon, it is a wide-angle shot from a low perspective:
Lighthouse, Kingston, Georgetown, Guyana
This is the “Lamp Room” at the top of the Lighthouse in Kingston, Georgetown, Guyana. It was taken from the stairwell at the level with the floor.
The Michael Lam Collection's Blog 