šø Inside 80 Buddhist Caves
+ the disappearance of Harry Kipper
ON FEATURE SHOOT
Inside 80 Buddhist Caves in India: One Scholarās 10,000-Image Archive
Dr. David S. Efurd, a two-time Fulbright recipient, associate professor, and chair of art and art history, has spent decades documenting the Buddhist cave sites of western India. Armed with a notebook and a handheld camera, he has visited more than 80 caves and captured over 10,000 photographs, which are now available through Artstor. This extraordinary archive reveals remarkably preserved monasteries carved directly into volcanic basalt cliff faces, along with religious art, monuments, architectural details, and sacred spaces dating back to the second century BC.
Efurdās work is grounded in the practice of āslow looking,ā in which he spends days closely observing spaces that many visitors might pass through in minutes. Through that deliberate attention, he reveals these ancient sites not only as extraordinary historical monuments, but as living places of religious expression and ongoing preservation.
READER SUBMISSIONS
āThe Disappearance of Harry Kipperā by Roberto Solomita
āIn January 1995, Italian media reported the disappearance of Harry Kipper, an English artist and cycle tourist. According to the reports, he was travelling across Friuli by bicycle, tracing the word āARTā through the route of his journey, when he vanished near the Slovenian border. Local and national newspapers formulated hypotheses, gathered clues and issued appeals.
āIt would later emerge that Harry Kipper had never existed: he was a fictional character invented by the Luther Blissett collective to test the permeability of the media system. This work does not reconstruct that event, but moves through Friuli as a territory of plausible ambiguity, where a story can be believed because it aligns with the forms it takes and the environment that sustains it.
āThe photographs adopt the language of documentation without actually documenting anything. They do not distinguish between evidence and staging, between trace and construction, operating along the boundaries of an indeterminacy that has accompanied the photographic image since its inception.
Harry Kipper thus becomes a case through which to observe how a story can move across a territory, be believed, disseminated, and ultimately disappear without leaving a trace.ā āRoberto Solomita, photographer
INSIGHT
āI feel like Iām building a sort of speculative future landscape, where these might be the last little fragments of a world that is lost. Sometimes, the plants and fungi feel a bit like they are huddling together, trying to hang on as things fall apart.ā āJulya Hajnoczky, photographer
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