This photo gallery contains a collection of pictures that I have taken since joining the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in October 1998. The collection will continue to evolve, as more pictures are added in the course of time.
Some of the pictures are of "professional" interest, while others are more "personal" in nature. However, since being a linguist involves the study of human beings, it is neither possible nor desirable to completely separate the professional from the personal. Thus, the pictures shown here are included for a wide variety of interrelated reasons. A few are included to illustrate some aspects of language and communication. Some are intended to show what the life of a linguist is like. Others are there in gratitude to some of the people whose languages I have studied. More generally, the photo gallery pays homage to the various peoples among which I have worked, and their different cultures and environments: in doing so it strives to highlight a central theme running through the human sciences, namely the search for diversity and unity in human nature.
Finally, many of the pictures are included simply because they are good pictures. For me, doing science and taking pictures are two aspects of a single, more general quest which is of a fundamentally aesthetic nature: constructing representations of reality that will stand on their own as objects of beauty.
Technical Information
The pictures were taken with an Olympus digital camera, the most recent ones with a C-960 zoom 1.3 megapixel model. A majority of the pictures were taken at a higher resolution than that which is shown here. Almost all of the pictures are presented in their original form without any further electronic manipulation; however a handful of shots have been cropped, using Adobe Photoshop. The photo gallery was created on a Macintosh PowerBook G4 using iView MediaPro and Microsoft FrontPage Editor.
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