These are good, maybe in a few cases great, photos, But I’m not seeing the “essay” part here. I see a random set of disjointed pictures, lacking thematic consistency.

As I understand it, the world will end next week. This bit of not very good news, and no matter on what side you stand regarding the existential question of why do some people choose to root for the Boston Red Sox, I think that we can all agree that the end of the world counts as not very good news indeed, comes to us courtesy of the ancient Maya, whose calendrical wisdom was such that even people pretending to be relatively sane, like Keynesian economists and life insurance salesmen, bow their heads in profound deference. The end of the world as we know it carries with it no end of special duties and burdens, like spending more time with your family, comforting those distressed by this somewhat unexpected turn of events, going to church and confessing one’s sins or not going to church and committing fresh sins while you still have time to commit them, and I am sure that the IRS will want you to know that, end of the world or not, you will still have to pay your income taxes for the 2012 tax year. Therefore, given the tentative nature of existence post-December 21st, you should file your Form 4868 for an automatic extension of your filing date as soon as possible. Apocalypses and extinction events are all very well and good, you see, but no one gets out of here alive or without paying what they owe to the government. There’s just no way that’s going to happen.

Now, I know that the Maya, ancient and otherwise, are a Third World—Native American—First Nations—collective noun of your choice people, and as such are filled with virtues, insights, and traditional knowledge permanently denied to vile, decadent, and materialist Euro—American schnooks like me, so I know I shouldn’t question the wisdom of the Maya elders when they foretell the end of the Earth in only a few short days, but I have a question and apparently no one has the answer: if the ancient Mayans were so attuned to the ways of the universe that they could predict when the world was going to end several hundred years in the future, how come they couldn’t predict when the Spanish were going to show up and put an end to their world in the 1500’s?

I mean, really, you and all your people are one with time, the universe, and everything, and you miss something like a large number of Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants about to show up on your doorstep intent on doing bad stuff to you and yours? How do you miss a megahumongous load of bad karma like that? This was an apocalyptic event for the Maya and no one saw it coming? Was the psychic radar screen in need of adjustment that week? If you ask me, and I know you didn’t but I don’t care, the arrival of the conquistadores was the sort of thing you’d think a very good prophet would have picked up on, especially when the prophet—king—soothsayer had to do his predicting while under the influence of psychedelic drugs and tugging a bit of homemade barbed wire through his genitalia, a feat that hurts just thinking about it. I know I would have predicted all sorts of things if someone were dragging a rope with imbedded stingray spines through my private parts; in fact, I would have predicted anything anyone wanted me to predict in order to get the fish parts out of my parts. The Spanish came intent on kicking ass; in those days it took months to get from Seville to Mayastan. The entire point of the exercise from day one was to get some ass—the mestizos didn’t come from nowhere, folks—kick other people’s ass, and grab as much gold as they could carry before going home and lording it over the peons for the rest of their lives. This is not something the Maya could have found out about by checking the airline passenger manifests for known troublemakers. And it’s not like the conquistadores booked a weekend trip to Cancun and then decided to stay on for a few extra weeks to take advantage of the duty—free looting, pillaging, and forcible converting to Catholicism deals offered by Iberia Airlines. The Spanish came to the Americas packing heat and with loads of malice aforethought on their minds. Something like that didn’t send a major league tsunami through the Maya equivalent of The Force?

No, it didn’t; the Spanish showed up the same way my Uncle Max used to, unwanted and unexpected, sort of like the flu, except with a better wardrobe, and none of the Maya knew that the Spanish were coming, or if they did, they did nothing about it. That strikes me as being very odd, no two ways about it, so I hope you’ll please pardon me if I think that the Mayan prediction that the world is going to end next Friday is a load of toads’ gonads. Their track record to date doesn’t seem very reliable, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. I still have my money on a nuclear war with the Iranians or the North Koreans. I know that that’s betting the chalk, but I still think that the odds are better.

Paul, I am sure we do, but we all love to take pictures and we are compelled to do so. To this extent, our reasons are the same, beyond that, I suspect they vary as much as we vary as individuals.

I don’t know if it’s obvious to everyone, or if I’m completely off base with my associations, but to give some examples:

The window streak in #3 turns into the bisecting sunflare in #4

The three dead trees in 4 transitions to the poles in 5

The curve in the road of 5 mimics the curl of the page in 6

The plane of the book in 6 equals the plane of the well in 7

Subject looking into the well in 7 has the same viewpoint as the photographer in 8

The corpse in 8 is taken over by the carcass of the ship in 9

And so it goes. There is some consideration to editing in this essay. Maybe I’ve just force-fit the elements to work for me, but I don’t see the solitary randomness of the images we may be tricked into seeing, given the differing photographic techniques present.

Wow. I’m guessing, then, that I’m not going to find anyone leafing through this in NatGeo down at the barber shop. Kind of limits the audience a little. Too much like art speak to me.

By this logic, there is no point in anyone ever trying to take another photo, tell another story or, for that matter, write a poem.

There is nothing wrong with a difficult-to-read story; generally there is more meat to chew and an added satisfaction from that extra pondering which slows our digestion. Compare it to the works of the above-mentioned Salgado, Nachtwey and Peterson, whose techniques are familiar and dare I say, predictable; here, the authorship of image inconsistency becomes itself the technique.

Is it any different from the many-authored “Road Trip Across America” or this spring’s “Rochester”? With so many authors, the story becomes less about the bias and prejudice of the individual story-teller, and focuses instead on the land and people as subject instead. It becomes less about photographing oneself, more about the thing in front of the photographer. Becheru’s approach is entirely consistent with his artist statement as he places the Delta foremost and himself, sub-ordinate.

What’s not to understand?