Scott G Trenorden

I’ve been browsing my photos from a recent trip up the mountains to Nong Khiau and am growing progressively bored of looking at them. The primary reason for this is the repetitious ’scenery shot after scenery shot’ layout, with a random localised shot thrown in.

There are only so many mountain-and-stream photos I feel it worthwhile to put up on my blog, and so I think I’ll just post this one:

The sun sets over Nong Khiau (Kiow, Khiow, Kheau.. depending on who you ask!).

The reasons for this repetition are several-fold, with the primary one being mostly philosophical.

It’s highlighted by Matt’s comment on a photograph I took of some school children in Cambodia:

“Would love to see more pics of locals like this, but I know you like to avoid confrontation.”

Initially I smiled and shrugged, but then I got to thinking about what exactly makes me refrain from putting my camera in peoples’ faces to get those ‘local’ shots.

And the answer to that simple question came almost instantaneously.

I have resolved that we, as tourists, very often treat the everyday people of Third World countries like animals in a zoo; like freaks in a sideshow or moving, living characters in a natural exhibition.

I constantly see tourists sitting or squatting a meter or two away from a local person - who is going about their oft-monotonous every day task - with their camera pretty much stuck in their face, going click… click… click.

Visitors wander the night markets, sitting on stools to shoot frames of the people trying to sell scarves and trinkets, stools intended for people to sit and inspect their wares, only to glance at their photo-handiwork before walking off without even acknowledging the worker they’ve just been shooting.

Seemingly gone is any sense of discretion or a respect for the local person’s privacy. Every other tourist here seems to have a dSLR and a ‘mini-PC’; big cameras stuck in small people’s faces, pausing to review their photographs and then repeating.

And frankly, it embarrasses me.

This is why I’ve not got many photos in my collection of people doing ordinary things.

Occasionally someone would pose or instruct me to take their photo (young kids are often quite forceful about you taking their photograph! Now!) and they would smile when I show them the photo on the camera.

I think that is their main impetuous for asking to be photographed; to see themselves on the little screen!

Also noteworthy I reckon: I’ve had a few tourists pose and ask me to photograph them, only to then hand me a business card and ask me to email it to them..! This happened a few times at Angkor Wat etc in Cambodia, and mostly by Korean people it seemed.

My quotation of hourly rates was often met with a blank stare.

So anyhow, more often than not and due primarily to our lovingly frakked up social system in the West, I usually delete photos of very young children after I take them. Probably an over-reaction, but then I really don’t want a collection of photos of little kids to begin with.

I guess what this also emphasises to me, and is quite depressing in the realisation, is that I have not taken much of any photojournalistic worth during my time away.

For if content is photojournalistic in nature and also involved photographing people then I doubt I would refrain from doing so; children working in a lumber camp or mine; monks carrying out an interesting ritual; people living in destitution in the backdrop of a big city; child soldiers etc.

On the up side though is that I feel I’ve discovered a lot in regards to the way to travel and locate these sorts of stories, what gear to travel with to do so and how you must leave yourself open to spontaneity.

For example, two nights ago in Nong Kheow/Khiau/Khiow just on dusk, while I was photographing the sunset, two fishermen told me they were going fishing and that I could join them.

I had my big old D700 and lens around my neck, the boat was small and seemingly taking on water, it was getting dark, mozzies were swarming and I had no Bushman spray on me. So I chickened out.
In the same situation with a better prepared backpack (with water and spray), my OM4 film and digital ‘point and shoot’ cameras, some 1600 ASA film and a better understanding of some of the local language and customs I would have definitely joined them on their evening fish.

Similarly in Vientiane a truck pulled up next to me with a few dust covered stone masons on the back, along with a few half-completed Buddha statues. They looked at me and smiled, and I know I could have just jumped on the back and joined them wherever they were heading.

With more confidence and decisiveness, a better understanding of what I should bring and carry around, and more mobility (physically, damn knees), I would go about things very differently.
This will of course come in time and will hopefully lead to many more photojournalistic opportunities that I’ve currently experienced during this trip.
And that is where I feel this trip has been so, so beneficial and unbelievably fun; it has taught me how to prepare for the next one, on which I will learn more how to prepare for the next one etc etc.

Until then, though, I really don’t feel comfortable taking staged photos of people doing whatever they do as their day-to-day task, as though they exist in their country purely as a living and moving observation for the rich and a/effluent.

Along with not enjoying taking those photos, I don’t really see them as being overly important. They are often devoid of emotion and integrity, primarily serving well as holiday ’snaps’.

Most of all, and most importantly to me, I just don’t want to contribute to the Human Zoo.

So I thought it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek; “In Vang Vieng, everyone sits around in open-sided bars, drinking beer and watching re-run after re-run of Friends”.

 

But sure enough, the first thing I am confronted with after doing the walk from the bus station to the town centre is Jennifer Aniston’s squawky voice and, yup, canned laughter.
Bar after bar, playing Friends, Simpsons, Futurama, with tourist after tourist seemingly comatose, not laughing, not moving… Probably still spinning from their mushroom shake.

It’s a wise idea that one; consuming a couple of shakes containing heavily hallucinogenic mushrooms, which take an hour or two to kick in (apparently…), with no idea of how many mushrooms you’re getting in each shake.

 

Intelligent.

 

And so, yes, I avoided doing some Mark Roy-inspired research into the apparently epic drug availability and instead spent my two days in Vang Vieng chatting with Steve, the owner of the Aussie Bar, hanging out with the wonderfully bad influencing Lori and generally just having some down time.

 

Vang Vieng is surrounded by very unique and beautiful mountains which seem to lean to the side. Well, they don’t seem to. They do.

Problem is you can’t really see them very well due to the dense smoke that hangs in the air everywhere – a by-product of the epic use of slash-and-burn ‘farming’ going on around these parts.

 

“I didn’t bother trying to edit out the green-blue sky, to show how heavy the smoke haze is in these parts.

A thick smoke hangs over Vang Vieng and is even worse in Luang Prabang… Horribly worse. As the black and white photos following this one attest to.”

 

And it only got worse when I headed higher into the mountains towards Luang Prabang. Oh did it get worse…

 

 

Smoke on the Mountain…

 

I’m sitting in a café now typing this up and looking out the front doors all I can see is a grey haze.
My eyes sting and I often feel like I have moth balls stuck up my nose due to all the soot in the air.

 

The drive up here was unbelievable. A couple of times we needed to shut the windows of the minivan while we drove past flames flicking across the road. Whole mountain ranges seemed to be on fire. Everywhere you looked was barren; tree-less hills were dotted everywhere.

 

Directly ahead of us was a massive mountain range…

 

 

Slash-and-burn season is in full effect.

 

What would be stunning vistas have been transformed into grey, featureless horizons. Essentially, the local people have absolutely massacred the beauty of this region with their seemingly archaic practices.

 

The barren hills await a soon to come rainy season, when all the nutrients will be washed off the slopes and into the rivers.

 

“Why do they do this??” Daniel asked me.

Why do they do this indeed?

 

I left this one in colour to show the condition of the landscape; hazed, scarred and charred by the burnings.

 

A mountain range rises up through the smoke.

 

If I had known that things would be this uncomfortable up here, I would have thought twice about coming. In fact, I don’t know whether I would have come at all.

 

Tomorrow I will travel over to Nong Khiow, a small village four hours from here. I imagine it will be just as bad there.

I wonder if I should bother to go at all..?

 

The sad thing is, Luang Prabang is an absolutely beautiful little town (well, it’s actually quite big). It’s easily the ‘artiest’ of the towns I’ve seen so far and is wonderfully French; it’s pretty much the town Vientiane wants to be.

The architecture makes this place so quaint and appetizing and the food is sensational.

 

A roadside village; a common sight during the drive up through the hills. The often back onto a several-hundred-metre drop.

 

A tractor lays in wait, amid a charred and graded landscape.

 

 

I would love to experience this town after the rainy season, when the roads are passable but slash-and-burning is not in effect.

 

Perhaps I will return one day and continue north to experience the border regions and local people in their traditional ways.

 

Besides the extreme discomfort of the smoke, this is definitely a town to visit and eventually come back to.