As they have for centuries, the people of Yangon clean their streets and temples by hand. Here, Botataung Temple undergoes a morning scrub down. This is an abstract approach to a workplace shot. The temple is famous for its stupa, which holds a hair of Buddha. I reduce that stupa to a shimmering gold reflection in the water the sweeper is using to clean the temple’s plaza. I tie the elements of this picture together with geometric rhythms. The sweeper’s head merges with the golden base of the stupa, a series of horizontal moldings. These horizontal lines repeat the flow of the horizontal safety rope the sweeper has put up to keep people away from the plaza while he cleans it. (I made sure the rope maintains its identity as a safety rope by not cropping out the small ribbons that hang from it at left and right. I did crop out some distracting elements on both the left and right sides of the frame.) The rope intersects with a red line extending the length of the plaza. The diagonal curb at the bottom of the frame repeats its diagonal thrust.

The sarong-clad sweeper himself, abstracted by the rear vantage point I am using, wields a broom that slices across both the rope and the paving line, and almost reaches the curb. The angle of the broom creates a series of triangles that seem to embrace the sweeper as he works. Meanwhile, the tilt of his hat brim echoes the angle of the broom, and the bend of his arm echoes the curves in the base of the stupa moldings. The final touch is the focal point of picture – as he steps carefully across the wet plaza, his right toe stops in mid step, pointing directly at the reflection of the temple’s most important shrine, its golden stupa.