I lived in Myanmar from 2015-2017. The whole time I was playing catch-up — with language, culture, documentation, travel — and I would stay lagging behind my own expectations to the end.
I was in Peace Corps before that, in Ethiopia, where I’d had a full two months of language and cultural training prior to moving to my work site. In Myanmar I had one meeting that lasted less than an hour that consisted mostly of looking at a map and being shown all the places I couldn’t or shouldn’t go. So I moved on to the unusual and quite savory experience of being plopped down into the middle of a curious reality that I endeavored to decode and make sense of in real time.
Eventually I understood how little I understood. Myanmar is culturally rich and diverse and complicated. As usual my camera provided a useful go-between to help me look at and take in as much as I could: religious, spiritual, and cultural sites and objects; landscapes; peoples; and those small moments that were either mysterious or simple and beautiful expressions of the moment where time, place, culture and people meet.
Speaking of people, viewers familiar with my body of work will know that I rarely feature portraits or images of people. That’s mostly because I have a strong reaction to the exploitative quality that has the potential to stain such photographs. I don’t want to steal anyone’s soul, not even a small part of it, and I do wonder if unsolicited photographs can do that. In this case, as I was putting these volumes together I found myself not just wanting, but needing, to include some pictures of people, for they offer another essential expression of place and culture. My hope is to not exploit but communicate their humanity and beauty.
This collection should provide the foundation for a future book, one that will include fewer images and more words. For now I will let the images speak for themselves.
