Street Phones, Indian Quarter, Yangon, Myanmar, 2005
I saw no pay phones in Yangon, the capital city of Myanmar. Very few cell phones, either. Instead, people can cheaply make or receive calls at street side tables such as this one on a crowded street in the Indian Quarter. To tell this story, I brought my 24mm wideangle lens within inches of the three soiled telephones, creating a foreground anchor layer that tells the story of hard and long use. I build my middle ground layer out of the paper and pen this woman uses to record her business activity and the tea she drinks to keep her going. In the background layer is the proprietor herself, passing the time between calls by studying. She brings her hand to her mouth nervously, no doubt wondering what I am doing there with my camera. A garbage dumpster fills half the image. She does not acknowledge its existence. Nor do her customers. It is life on the street in Old Rangoon, and the wideangle tells its story well.
Hindu Offerings, Indian Quarter, Yangon, Myanmar, 2005
A young girl staffs a street stall selling floral offerings just outside of the Hindu Temple in Yangon's Indian Quarter. Her face is painted heavily with Thanaka paste, traditional makeup worn by Burmese women and children as sun block and to make the skin healthy. She looks at my camera without showing emotion of any kind, which was very typical of Burmese. Many are not yet aware of the custom of smiling for the camera, which usually works to my advantage as a photographer. My wideangle lens spreads the scene for me, allowing me to flank the young girl on both sides with offerings yet still make her face large enough to see the incongruous detail of the Thanaka paste. The offerings, which are closer to my camera than they look, provide a foreground layer that gives the image its context. The middle ground layer holds the subject – the detached, painted child, crouching in the shadows. The background layer is subtle but still important, a row of bars symbolizing a barrier that may well keep this child in this place as she grows into adulthood.
22-JAN-2005
Tangerines, Luang Prabang, Laos, 2005
The 24mm wideangle lens is a favorite tool of photojournalists. To me, expressive travel photography is a form of photojournalism. My goal is make a picture that tells a story, and few lenses are as effective storytellers as true wideangle lenses. I simply could not work without one. In this case I am expressing the frustration of those who must sit all day in a market and sell their products for a pittance. The hands of those involved in it tell the story. Using my Canon G6 at waist level, and looking down into a flip up LCD viewing screen, I was able to unobtrusively move in between these two customers to shoot down on the two women doing the selling, choosing a tight, intimate vantage point, yet embracing the entire story within the scope of a wideangle lens. (Something I could not do as unobtrusively if I had been working with a DSLR!) One of them sits sullenly, watching the transaction that is going down over her shoulder. The woman doing the selling is thrusting a bag of tangerines at her customer, who already has two bags of them in her basket. With her other hand, she holds her head. She is either very tired or bored with her job. Because of the optics of the wideangle lens, the hand holding out the bag appears to be larger than the other hand. It is also slightly blurred. The woman at right counts out her money deliberately, keeping the bored tangerine seller waiting. Meanwhile, the customer’s son uses his hand to stuff a slice of tangerine into his mouth. You, the viewer, are stuck in the middle of this transaction. You ride on the shoulders of these customers, and stare into the faces of those disinterested and perhaps frustrated vendors. I anchor the image with a foreground layer featuring the shopping basket and the masses of tangerines on the ground. The two frustrated vendors become the middle ground layer. And the empty street, symbolizing a scarcity of customers, becomes the background layer, adding context for additional meaning. To embrace such a story as this, I have thrust myself into the midst of the transaction itself, and with a 24mm wideangle lens stressed the story the hands are telling us.