Christine Osborne
My journeys began in the Pacific islands in the 1960s, when travel was far less homogenised than it is today – a time when you could simply roam, without having to state a return date on your airline ticket. And while I have flown across the globe on more occasions than I can recall, my happiest times were of travelling slowly around the world on the old Messageries Maritimes packet-steamers spending days in exotic ports like Tahiti, Aden and Djibouti, or Mombasa, Dakar and Zanzibar, frequently disembarking to explore terra-firma with a notebook and camera – no laptops in those days.
In the 1990s, I began specialising in world religions focusing largely on people practising their chosen belief and observing the associated rites of passage. Together with my travel images, they have been used in a wide variety of books produced by leading academic publishers. When Bill Gates launched Corbis, a leading photographic agency, my image of a ‘Blue Man’ on a dune in the Sahara was chosen from a million others to promote the Corbis website.