Richard Rapfogel, Special Mention, 2004 Banff Mountain Photography Competition

"This image is from Agasthiyar Falls in the Western Ghats mountain range of southern India. A temple dedicated to the sage Agasthiyar clings to the rocky mountain above the Falls. Legend has it that when Shiva married Parvati, he was worried that the influx of people from the South attending the wedding in the North would cause the North to sink, so he dispatched Agasthiyar to the South (to this waterfall, naturally) in order to balance the world.

“The waters that supply the Falls flow through forests filled with medicinal herbs, past Agasthiyar’s pure abode, and feed the verdant fields below, contributing to the belief that the waters at Agasthiyar Falls have healing powers. Of course there’s also a strong recreational component to the Falls’ popularity: it’s fun and cooling to be pummelled by the force of the water’s 100-metre drop."

Richard Rapfogel recently traded a 25-year career as a psychologist for the full-time pursuit of his 40-year passion for photography. He describes his work as a means of engaging with, more fully experiencing and better understanding the layering of meaning which resides below the surface of life. Richard’s photographs are quite varied in subject matter, ranging from images of people in India and elsewhere, to graffiti-laden walls, to studies of a single forested acre in North Carolina, but they share a common artistic impulse: to participate in life by looking, to allow oneself to be touched and influenced by what one sees, to articulate that experience and, hopefully, to illuminate it.