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Maybe less than a kilometre apart on Myanmar’s Lake Inle: fishing for fish vs fishing for tourist dollars


The Myanmar workshop

After a lot of planning by Country Holidays, the Myanmar 2014 workshop started on the 5th December, with people flying in from Singapore, Hong Kong, Washington DC, London, New Zealand and Shanghai. Including trip leader Andy Yeo and myself, there were fifteen of us, for nine days. I want to congratulate Country Holidays, who lived up to their reputation as one of Asia’s premier high-end tour operators, on a seamless organisation. This was my first workshop with them, and it won’t be my last.

Last month’s newsletter theme turned out to be apt. How do we continue to shoot and explore in the middle of an accelerating tourist boom? Myanmar is very much a case in point. Imagine the circumstances: a Southeast Asian country that was always exotic and traditional, mothballed for more than half a century because of political isolation, while all around are countries with booming economies and developing tourist industries. Myanmar was just waiting to happen as a destination. I first went in 1982, when visits were restricted to six nights (which you could spin out to seven days if you booked the right flights in and out), and this, in 2014, was my thirteenth trip. And we stayed at the Strand! The last time for me was on that first trip, when it was distinctly run-down, had a visible population of cockroaches, a very limited stock of warm Mandalay Beer, and cost about $20 a night.

Now it’s a little different. For the last few years we’ve been getting used to increasing numbers of tourists, putting a strain on the infrastructure. Hotels and flights were the main concern, but Country Holidays sorted all of that out. However, even in the past year, since I was last there for the shooting of 7 Days in Myanmar, the numbers of people at the most popular locations has increased dramatically. Well, for someone visiting the country for the first time, you can’t simply ignore the great sights like the Shwedagon and sunrise over Bagan, but they’ve become something of a challenge. On this workshop we mixed the well-known like these with the generally ignored, like the Fish Market in Yangon and the Mandalay waterfront. At dawn, neither of these busy and photogenic sites had any other foreigners, whereas Shwesandaw (one of the few pagodas in Bagan which people are permitted to climb for the view) was crowded from almost one hour before sunrise! Not impossibly crowded, but I can foresee a time soon when numbers will be restricted. As you can imagine, most of us agreed that the Fish Market and the Mandalay waterfront were the most rewarding.

But the location that gave me most pause for thought was Lake Inle, another place that I hadn’t visited for three decades. It’s now very comfortable, with lovely lakeside hotels. One of the sights has always been the leg-rowing fishermen who, because of the shallowness of the lake use a unique fishing method—a large bamboo cone containing a net, and they plunge it to trap fish. That’s why they row with their legs, to leave their hands free. This is what they look like, in a picture I took in 1982….


   As it was, a bit scruffy
 

…and the reason I’m showing this old picture is that it’s not like that any more. There is so much more motorboat traffic on the lake that the water gets churned up, and they can no longer fish like this (except in one or two very remote parts of Inle). They now use line nets, although still rowing with their legs. And yet there are fishermen with cones still around, especially at the northern end of the lake where the passenger boats enter. It’s just that they don’t fish. They perform, and they get paid for it. They’ll even do acrobatics with the cone. As one of our group put it, it’s Cirque du Soleil. We shot both this, the performance, and then the next morning, not far away, real fishing. It gave us much to think about and discuss later. The ‘performance’ no longer had any basis in reality, which freed everyone up to play with shapes, lights, graphics, but the actual real fishing shots were much more reportage and explanatory in style.

So what, I wonder, is this all about at National Geographic: http://blog.natgeocreative.com/post/103805256313/what-we-liked And it’s an old friend of mine, Mike Yamashita, who took the very appealing picture. But it’s not of fishermen, it’s of performers. Why are people coy about admitting this? What happened to photojournalism? Interestingly, when everyone on our workshop came to select their best images, the real shots easily outnumbered the stage set shots. Time for Zhang Yimou to move in there to Inle, I think, and do a proper showtime job. Maybe some aquatic line dancing? Just kidding.
 
 

Publishing news

My big news of the season is that my publisher of books on photography, Ilex, has now been bought by Octopus, part of the Hachette group, and I’m very happy about it. Ilex was founded by my old friend Alastair Campbell in the first month of 2000, and I owe him the thanks of pulling me in right at the start to write for him. The Photographer’s Eye owes as much to his support as to my persistence in getting the idea of a book without digital cameras (shock, horror!) accepted by co-edition publishers. There was reluctance in those other editorial offices—where’s the digital, they cried, as if the fundamentals of photography had changed. I’ll miss our lunchtime concept meetings now that he’s retired, but now at least we’ll be able to concentrate on lunch! In passing Ilex on to Octopus, Alastair has, however, found it a good home.
 
 

Next…Cartagena

Next up, after Christmas and the New Year, is Cartagena, Colombia. I’ll arrive January 18th and stay until the 27th February, so that’s plenty of time. As I mentioned, the way this works is that I’m shooting a book on the city, and happy to take people arriving individually, so that this workshop doesn’t depend on making the numbers, as they usually do. It’s US$400 a day for the workshop, and you take care of the flights and accommodation. A few days, perhaps four, would be what I’d suggest. Simply write to me, and we can also recommend places to stay—there’s a wide range, to suit all pockets.

Beyond that, however, I’m now working out the next workshop in Asia. My tea book shooting will continue until the middle of May, so realistically I can’t do anything before then. That applies also to Lijiang and the workshops I’ve been doing regularly with The Bivou in Shuhe, which is a pity, but after May I’ll have time. Wherever we finally decide for the next Country Holidays Signature trip, it will be very much focused on the photography, from shooting through editing and production, and right now we’re looking at interesting and unusual locations. Accommodation may fluctuate in quality, but I think that’s a small price to pay for being able to explore.
 
 

…and the Online Foundation Course restarts

I had to halt the Online Foundation Course at MyPhotoSchool for the last two months, as it was impossible to keep up using the poor and uncertain internet connections I had in Asia. But now we’re starting again, on the 3rd January: http://www.my-photo-school.com/course/michael-freemans-the-photographers-eye/


 

 
Copyright © Michael Freeman 2014, All rights reserved.