photo sharing and upload picture albums photo forums search pictures popular photos photography help login
Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Ninety-Six: From the Persian Gulf to the Andaman Sea > Bus stop, Rangoon, Burma, 2016
previous | next
16-DEC-2016

Bus stop, Rangoon, Burma, 2016

This image is a study in double incongruity. I photographed these people, complete strangers to each other, as they waited for a bus within a city bus stop shelter. The shelter displays an advertisement for a local cellular service provider. It features a pair of growling costumed characters standing upon the screen of a large cell phone painted along the bottom of the advertisement. I moved my vantage point to place those characters on either side of the woman seated on the right. She is also costumed, wearing an illustrated blouse. Painted on her her face are two large yellowish circles, a cosmetic paste made from ground bark called Thanaka. It is intended both as decoration and protection from the Burmese sun. The man seated next to her wears a long skirt. Both Thanaka and long men’s skirts are Burmese cultural staples, but when viewed by foreigners, they seem strange and certainly incongruous. Neither person reacts to each other or to those incongruities, but we, as outsiders, can appreciate the humor here. By placing such incongruities into what is already an incongruous setting, I’ve created an image that stimulates the imagination by simultaneously contrasting a set of both cultural and commercial incongruities

FujiFilm X-T1
1/350s f/6.7 at 230.0mm iso640 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
share
Phil Douglis22-Feb-2017 05:57
Both of you, Tim and Marisa, are touching on the essential purpose behind this image. I am using incongruities to comment on the ironies of communication itself.
Tim May14-Feb-2017 21:56
Her placement with the two characters approaching her speaks to me of the infiltration of the internet into our consciousness. Also, so many of the icons on the walls speak to communication and there is no communication between the two on the bench.
Marisa Taddia10-Feb-2017 22:43
It's fantastic Phil! The solemnity of the faces contrasts with the graphics of the advertisement, in a way that leads us to think of the true reaches of human communication. Almost as a suggestion of the lightness of the virtual world, in contrast to a communication that, as in the case of the image, has a lot of "what is not said", of the gestures, of those invisible ways of sending messages, so present when we are face to face.
Type your message and click Add Comment
It is best to login or register first but you may post as a guest.
Enter an optional name and contact email address. Name
Name Email
help private comment