Turtle Islands

📖 The Scoop

Turtle Islands: Balinese Ritual and the Green Turtle employs Charles Lindsay's remarkable color photography and personal journals to explore an ecological and anthropological phenomenon of great scope, complexity, and resonance. We encounter these magnificent beings, which existed before dinosaurs, both underwater and as they struggle ashore to lay their eggs in what eminent naturalist Lyall Watson calls "one of the most single-minded, self-sacrificing patterns of fixed behavior in the entire animal kingdom". Sadly, we learn of the turtles' decimation at the hands of those who hunt them and plunder the eggs for their reputed power as aphrodisiacs. But Lindsay also invites us to witness the holy rites and festivals for which green turtles are trapped and killed yet by which they are still revered - supreme among them Tri Bhuwana, which is celebrated only once a century, the natural life span of the turtle, to appease the gods and restore a universal balance disrupted by man. Never before has this arcane ritual been captured on film. Lyall Watson's remarkable essay on the spiritual and evolutionary significance of the turtle throughout history further illuminates the ninety startling full-color images.

Genre: Photography / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions / General (fancy, right?)