To say that Carol Scribner comes from an eclectic background is an understatement. Carol is a former professional pipe organist, registered nurse, Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) consultant, a retired advertising, marketing and communications CEO/founder and an award winning documentary writer, producer, director and photographer.
The company that bore her name represented such clients as Procter & Gamble, Merck, Lilly, Smith Kline, The Upjohn Company, Fujisawa and other global pharmaceutical and health care clients. Throughout her career she has combined her talents and passions to inform, educate and motivate the public about issues of health and quality of life.
Since retiring from the corporate world, Carol has traveled extensively, capturing images of extraordinary people who live in exotic corners of the world in very ordinary moments of their lives. These moments mirror those most ordinary yet meaningful moments in our own lives...our work, raising our children, practicing our faith, creating our homes. Many of these images, along with images of precious artifacts collected in her travels, have been combined with her prose and poetry into a powerful celebration of life in ten remote corners of the world in a book entitled To Life...in the Small Corners.
Profits from the sale of the book will be donated to TurtleWill, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation aiding families in Africa, India and Mongolia. Carol and her husband, C. Lawrence Decker, MD, a member of the foundation's board, are longtime supporters of TurtleWill. Their support of this worthwhile charity began with their early journeys to Ethiopia and Mali with TurtleWill founder Irma Turtle.
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Sometimes what brings an author to a book is as interesting or inspiring or important as the book itself... sometimes it’s a matter of life and death.
To Life...in the Small Corners is not just the title of Carol Scribner’s new book, it’s a promise. Its purchase translates directly into warm blankets for an orphanage, wheelchairs for the crippled, a new beginning for a child with a cleft palate, a well for a village and much more. Ten years ago or so Carol, an award winning documentary writer, producer, director and photographer, and her husband, Dr. Larry Decker, moved to Sedona, Arizona. One lazy Sunday morning while reading The New York Times Magazine Section they discovered a story about a woman with an unusual name, Irma Turtle, and her company, Turtle Tours. The piece featured one of Irma’s adventurous trips down the Niger River in Mali, West Africa. Avid travelers, Carol and Larry immediately called Irma and booked a trip...the seeds for To Life were planted. What followed was a decade of journeys to Mali, Ethiopia, Tibet, Vietnam, Namibia, Morocco, Laos, Burma, Cambodia and Bhutan.
Meantime, IrmaTurtle had founded TurtleWill, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to help the peoples of the small corners of Mali, Ethiopia and Niger preserve their cultures, independence and self-sufficiency through education, mobile medical clinics, and startup loans for women’s cooperatives and food cooperatives, among countless other accomplishments.
After seeing first hand -- and photographing -- the very people Irma sought to help, Carol had a new mission...to help raise funds for TurtleWill. A year long labor of love culminated as Carol and Larry stood by two giant presses in southern China and watched them give birth to the satiny pages of this emotionally charged coffee table book. In 232 pages of soulful photography and exquisite prose, Carol Scribner takes us on a journey of the heart to ten exotic small corners of our planet and shows us that for all our differences, “in the smallest corners of our hearts we were constructed with the same soft edges.
”Profits from To Life...in the Small Corners are dedicated to TurtleWill.
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Art/Photography
TO LIFE . . . in the small corners
Carol A. Scribner
Butterfly Productions
225 Pages
ISBN 0-9752936-0-5, Hardcover, $48.00
Apr 01, 2005
Beyond the world of laptops and the latest reality show, lies another, forgotten, hidden world in the corners. TO LIFE…in the small corners celebrates lives rarely examined by our society. Author/photographer Carol A. Scribner takes the reader on a journey of the heart, as she captures in poignant words and exotic pictures, other cultures in far-flung places.
Through the medium of remarkably evocative photographs and expressive prose, the author introduces people and places at once strangely alien and yet fundamentally familiar. With empathy, Scribner illuminates these worlds, drawing the reader into them as their subjects go about their daily lives, harvesting rice out of paddies in Vietnam, or participating in a tribal dance in Ethiopia. In the latter photograph, young girls are vying for the attention of the males of the tribe. While their garb is completely alien, the expressions of happiness and excitement on the teen’s faces are the same of any American going to the prom. And that is the point of TO LIFE…in the small corners. Again and again the author brings home two vital messages: humans are gloriously diverse in the way they celebrate life, and yet at the same time share the same hopes and fears and pleasures.
The author’s credentials are formidable: Scribner is an inactive registered nurse, a former Department of Health, Education and Welfare maternal and Infant Care Grant nursing consultant, and a retired advertising, marketing, and communications CEO, among many, many other passions and professions during her career. In addition to photographing her subjects, she has also written heartfelt text:
"You see that outside our skin our worlds are so different.
But do you not see that in the smallest corners of our hearts…
We are constructed with the same soft edges."
The photographs are the real focus here, however, and the reader is struck by the beauty and vivid imagery Scribner has captured with her camera. In Namibia, for example, the reader is spellbound by the beauty of the deep red earth tones as dune chases dune (“ Each day creates a fresh canvas for our footsteps…each one brushed clean by the night”) illustrated by a gorgeous expanse of desert at once forbidding and inviting.
Scriber has done a marvelous job of bringing to life lands and peoples mostly forgotten…in the small corners, and this book is highly recommended to anyone interested in expanding their world view.
THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
SMALL PRESS BOOKWATCH: December 2004
James A. Cox, Editor - in - Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard drive, Oregon, WI 53575
The Photography Shelf
To Life In The Small Corners
Carol A. Scribner
Butterfly Productions, LLC
165 Shadow RockDrive, Sedona, AZ 86336
0975293605 $48.00 1 - 877 - 818 - 7907
Award - winning documentary writer, producer, director and photographer Carol Scribner enhances her personal, on - site observations of remote and exotic small backwaters of the world with 232 pages of her superbly presented color photographs. Scribner takes the reader along to meet the peoples of Namibia, Burma, Morocco, Tibet, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Mali, Cambodia and Laos. From the crimson sandunes of Namibia in West Africa to the winding Mekong River in Southeast Asia, we are treated to a visual tour - de - force as we see the diversity of the human cultures and the universality of the human spirit. To Life In The Small Corners is a superb body of work that is especially recommended to the attention of students of photography and sociology, as well as the dedicated armchair traveler!
-Kathleen Youmans
12/28/05
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