Traveling Light

Notes & lessons of a learning photographer

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In a grey suit, pants and a camera looped around his neck, he appeared grossly overdressed, unfitting for cherry blossom viewing at a national park. But perhaps he is girded by his own tradition, to meet with the sakura with utmost respect and gratitude, as though meeting his destined partner at an omiai, to greet beauty and grace, no matter how fleeting they may be, with the same courtesy bestowed. Likewise with death.

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A collection of some of my photo essays.

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Interview with Patrick Chauvel in 2014

Patrick Chauvel (b. 1949) is an esteemed war photographer who has covered conflicts around the world for almost half a century.

A grandfather of three, he is here at the Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops to show an important body of work called “Ceux du Nord” at the projection evening tonight at the FCC Angkor.

But the photographs were not taken by him. They were the works of North Vietnamese photographers that covered the battlelines of Vietnam War from the other side that Chauvel was covering.

These rarely-seen images were given a standing ovation at the Visa Pour l’Image Festival at Perpignan, France recently. APF Festival Director Jean-Yves Navel who saw the photos in Perpignan then invited Chauvel to show these images here, which Chauvel quickly agreed.

We sat down with Chauvel in a question-and-answer (Q&A) session to talk more about how he obtained these images and why it is important for people to see them today. The interview has been edited for brevity.

APF: When did you first started working as a photographer?

Chauvel: In 1967, I started working as a war photographer which I have been doing for almost half a century now. I covered the Israeli Six-Day war, and my first big story is on the Vietnam War in 1968, which included the war in Cambodia and Laos.

APF: Tell us more about the body of work that you are showing at the Angkor Photo Festival this year.

Chauvel: I have a foundation, and I am constantly looking for archives of forgotten and unknown photographers.

I have thought about my North Vietnamese colleagues for the past 40 years. Many times, when we see the bombings during the war, we would wonder how anyone could survive and how reporters and photographers on the other side could have worked in such conditions.

When we were in Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City), we would have a drink with other photographers and said, “To the North guys, whoever they are”.

Last year, I was invited by the French Embassy’s Cultural Service in Hanoi to talk about war photography and I wondered, “Hey, maybe some of them did survive”. I found four North Vietnamese photographers and they showed me their work. I was amazed because their works were fantastic.

I decided to show them to people because some of them were very famous and the pictures were probably seen by the other side- East Germany and Moscow but on this side, we’ve never seen them. The idea is to show the pictures taken from the Communist side to the world.

APF: Tell us about the process of finding these photographers and photographs.

Chauvel: Once you find one photographer, you find everybody because they all know each other, even among the South Vietnamese photographers. The hard part is to go through the archives of the Vietnamese government.

There are about 1,000 books with tiny pictures and Vietnamese captions, and we have to go through every book to make our choices. We made small prints of about 300 pictures, and we scanned these pictures in high resolution.

I have an editor who came with me, and another friend working on this project. There is also a lot of work in Paris, which involves cleaning the pictures which had lots of scratches and dust. When the North Vietnamese photographers saw the pictures again in Perpignan, they nearly didn’t recognize them because they were much better printed than the originals.

It took us a lot of work, but the pictures are so incredible that they have kept me going.

APF: Are you now friends with these North Vietnamese photographers?

Chauvel: Yes, we talk to each other. One of the North Vietnamese photographers told me about an explosion of a building in Quang Tri province on the right side of the road and he said it hurt him in the arm. I corrected him by saying it was on the left side. Then, we realized we were there on the same day, about 100 meters from each other, just not from the same side.

I am making a film about the process of meeting them and telling their stories. The film is about reuniting them and going back to history with these North Vietnamese photographers. There was a lot of propaganda back then but today, they are all part of history.

I still don’t agree with their politics. But we are doing the same job, and this is what I recognize.

APF: What is the difference between the coverage of the VIetnam War by the North Vietnamese photographers and those in the south?

Chauvel: The photographs are incredibly positive. You don’t see many dead people in their pictures but there are many photos of people smiling with their flags.

Our ideals about covering the war were different. We were showing how terrible war was but the North Vietnamese were taking romantic pictures of heroism so that the war may continue. They were there to stimulate courage among the people so that they would continue to fight for their cause, which is reunification.

Most of these photographers were in the army and so, they also had guns. Their first mission is to fight, and the second, to record the fighting. But it is obvious these guys were very good photographers. It is art and you can see there is a lot of pain and work involved in getting these photographs.

APF: Why is it important for the young people to see these photographs today?

Chauvel: History is usually written by the winners, but that is untrue for Vietnam. Most books about the Vietnam War had been written by South Vietnamese and Americans. It is about time the North Vietnamese tell their story, even if I don’t agree on their side of the story.

The young people in Vietnam do not know much about the war, and come 30th April next year2015, it will be the 40th anniversary of Vietnam War’s end. These photographers are now aged between 75 and 90 years old. And so, this is probably the last few opportunities that the witnesses have to tell the story and get more people interested in it.

Any nation that forgets its past will lose its balance. Wars are part of our history and history is part of our lifeline, our humanity. If the young people don’t know about this piece of history, they will repeat this mistake.

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Interview with Kim Hak in 2014

As a young boy, Kim Hak has seen his mother boil water, and sometimes a wild chicken in a kettle the family have been using during the turbulent years of the Khmer Rouge regime.

His fascination towards objects and heirlooms that Cambodians kept, sometimes secretly, during the civil unrests, has now become photographs in an ongoing series called “Alive”. Each image in “Alive” is the possession of a Cambodian that has endured years of hardship under the Khmer Rouge regime.

The images are currently exhibited at The 1961, . The exhibition will run from Nov 29 to Dec 20, 2014.

Many of these objects belong to Kim’s family, while others are owned by parents and grandparents of his friends. Some, including a book containing handwritten Buddhist Scriptures in Khmer language by its owner, were forbidden under the Khmer Rouge regime and so, had been painstakingly hidden for years.

Photographed to depict the objects’ actual size, these every-day items appear unassuming, even poetic, but tell tales of a harrowing past.

“These images are about war and suffering,” Kim said when met in Siem Reap. “I want the viewers to look deeper into the picture and ponder on the effects of war.”

Originally from Battambang, Kim was born two years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended. Memories of his parents struggling to rebuild their lives after the turmoil caused by civil unrests haunted Kim for years.

Photography, he said, is a tool to memorialise the sufferings of war, even though many of its victims are still reluctant to speak about it today, Kim said.

Through the years, the Cambodian photography practice has evolved with more works on social issues in the scene. “There is an increasing awareness that photography is also an expression of art and can be used to reflect on where our society is heading,” Kim said.

Kim hopes his images in “Alive” will spur discussions and debates among the young Cambodians that have little knowledge of the civil unrests as the subject is largely taboo among the older generation.

“War may kill the victim but it cannot kill the memory of its survivors,” he said. “Through these images, I am paying tribute to those that refused to leave during the war and wipe out this piece of history.”

“Alive” is an extension of Kim’s two previous bodies that touched on the idea of memory. An alumni of the Angkor Photo Workshop, he said it has changed his outlook on photography. “I used to look for beautiful images only, but the workshop helped me to discover my own style without compromising my identity.”

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Interview with Jose Raymond Panaligan in 2014

As a photographer documenting a social issue, Phillippines-based Jose Raymond Panaligan (b. 1969) believes he should be emotionally invested in the story.

In 1992, Jose started his career in photojournalism and began photographing the Mangyans, an indigenous group made up of seven tribes, who live in the forests on the island of Mindoro, where Jose grew up. The Mangyan tribes are reclusive and each tribe has its own language and customs.

As a boy, Jose watched the Mangyans fetch water from the river and would marvel at their ability to live as one with nature. He imagined the Mangyans as the original Filipinos before the Phillipines were colonised by Spain in the 16th century.

“In a way, when I am photographing the Mangyan people, I am tracing back my childhood and my past,” he said in an interview in Siem Reap. Jose is here for the opening reception of “The Mangyan Photographs” at 6.00PM this evening at the E.F.E.O.

But over the years, Jose said he has changed from just photographing the community to becoming an observer-participant with the Mangyans’ struggles. The Mangyans is marginalised and face serious threats of losing their ancestral lands to logging and mining companies that are often backed by the military.

Jose not only ate and lived in the homes of the Mangyans, but also helped them to conduct hunger strikes to protest against the land-grabs they faced. “To really tell the story, you have to side with the community you are photographing, no question about that,” he said. “You may call it a propaganda for all I care.”

He believes the basic tenets of photojournalism are bridging the gap between people through stories and compelling people to think or take action after seeing these stories.

Jose’s socially-engaged work has not gone unnoticed. In 1999, he was a grant recipient from the Asian Cultural Council in New York City. He was also among the first recipients of the Ateneo Center for Journalism/World Press Photo Foundation Photojournalism scholarship grant in 2006.

To keep him grounded, he constantly questions whether his photographs are really helping the people and finding new ways of telling the story about the Mangyans. When not photographing, Jose pores over his contact sheets to look for new situations to photograph.

Although he has spent more than two decades photographing the Mangyans, Jose said he is not about to stop. “It will be ongoing,” he said. “As long as these photographs serve as the Mangyans’ voice.”

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Interview with Zeng Nian in 2014

Zeng Nian’s images in the body of work ‘A Quiet River: Construction of the Three Gorges Dam’ are sultry, panoramic spreads on China whom many consider as art photography. But to Zeng, he is a documentarian at heart.

His exhibition will open at 6.00PM today along the riverside across from the Angkor Sayana Hotel & Spa today. The exhibition is part of the inaugural GreenLight Exhibition Series, jointly supported by the AIMF (L’Association Internationale des Mairies Francophones), Ville de Genève, and Siem Reap Government.

Born in 1954 in Jiangsu Province, China, Zeng was exposed to photography from an early age and would take photographs for fun using a camera borrowed from friends.

He was 12 years old when the Cultural Revolution swept all over China. Afflicted by the hardships he saw around him, he had wished he could document the events that happened then but was too poor to buy a camera.

“I knew this was an extraordinary time for China,” he said when met in an interview in Siem Reap. “I wanted to photograph the things and people I knew would disappear one day.”

As he was unable to continue with his studies, Zeng worked as a sailor where he first encountered the Yangtze River. The river which originates in the Tibetan plateau and empties itself at the Pacific Ocean is Asia’s longest and the pulse of China’s early civilizations.

Zeng started his photography career in France which he left for in 1985 and currently lives in Paris. Over the years, he made frequent trips to China to photograph for various French and American publications such as Le Monde and New York Times (NYT) and visit family and friends.

But it was until 1996 that he was to revisit the Yangtze River with a camera on an assignment on the construction of the Three Gorges Dam by the NYT Magazine.

The Chinese government had started building a massive dam called ‘The Three Gorges’ which would be the world’s largest hydraulic dam, submerging hundreds of towns and villages and displacing millions of people in the process.

At first, Zeng documented the construction of the dam using a 35mm camera and later switched to a 6×17 camera and black-and-white film instead.

His photographs were rejected by newspapers and magazines initially because they were seen as unconventional. “They can’t use these pictures as they were unsuitable for the publications’ layout,” he said with a chuckle. “What’s more, these images are not colour.”

Despite the criticism, Zeng persisted with his approach. He photographed villages that had been earmarked to be flooded by the dam. He ate with construction workers and took portraits of them. Sometimes, these workers posed for him, other times he took images of them toiling under the sun. His final images on the body of work were taken in 2012, the year the dam was completed.

Shortly after completing his body of work, Zeng returned to the dam vicinity to meet the people he photographed. He has since turned his lens on the workers to create portraits for his new project.

“I am neither an artist nor a journalist,” he said. “I merely photograph because I know that when all these scenery have disappeared, at least I still have some photographs for myself.”

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Interview with Max Pam in 2014

Australian photographer Max Pam has a wanderlust that does not extinguish. At the age of 20, he landed in Singapore for the trip of his lifetime, traveling by land all the way to London, and traversing the most remote parts of India and Pakistan on the way.

His interest in photography began at the age of 16, when he took a camera and 60 rolls of film with him to document his travel experiences. This first journey would mark the beginning of a photographic career, or better yet, a pilgrimage that is still ongoing after more than four decades.

Max is here to give a special representation tonight at the projection evening at 8:30 PM at the FCC Angkor. He will also exhibit his body of work “Kailash”, a journal about the Mount Kailash in North India, which he travelled to in 1999. The exhibition opens tomorrow, Dec. 6, at 5.00PM at the Riverside Gardens, supported by Raffles Grand Hotel D’Angkor. It is also part of the inaugural GreenLight Exhibition Series, jointly supported by the AIMF (L’Association Internationale des Mairies Francophones), Ville de Genève, and the Siem Reap Municipality.

“I am not a travel photographer,” Max said when met in Siem Reap. “I am a photographer that travels a lot”.

We sat down with Max in Siem Reap for a chat on his photographic journeys and his deliberate choice to put his travel experiences into book format, of which there are 15 to date. The interview has been edited for brevity.

APF: You are an avid traveler. Do you keep count of how many places you have travelled to?

Max: There are places I have never been, but in a lifetime how much can one see? You are not going to tick every box, and I am not really interested in that.

But in the course of one’s photographic career, even because of the festival scene, they invite you to countries you’ve never been before.

In 2011, I had an exhibition in Chile and I had never been to South America before. It is interesting how photography works in that. You began as a photographer who loves to travel, and then the system catches up to you and actually and it takes you on trips.

My mother is 94 years old, and so, Inshallah, I will live to a good old age. If I keep going on this way, I might see everywhere!

APF: Why do you choose to show your photography in books?

Max: Traveling is something I do for myself and that is the primary concern. But for me, the book is everything. It is more important than an exhibition. To get a book is kind of like a validation of what you do.

Exhibitions come and go, and you are only as good as your last exhibition. The whole idea of a book, to me, is they become a record, a testament.

APF: Tell us about the process involved in making a Max Pam photography book.

Max: I didn’t finish my first book until I was 42 years old. It is a lot of work. My last book took me about seven years and 32 drafts. Right now I am working on a new book. It is 400 pages now. If I keep going, it could reach 500 or 600 pages, and it is becoming overweight. It is like cooking, you keep reducing the gravy until it becomes tasty. Now it is a very fat kind of book. And then, I slim it down to make it fat-free.

APF: Your photobooks have more than just photographs, as you also play with texts and drawings, making those books highly personalized bodies of work. Why do you do that?

Max: There is only a certain amount that you can photograph that delivers experience because photography is mostly in descriptive in nature.

I find it hard to photograph emotions. The emotions that I am interested in are not in photojournalism, nor bearing the results to something excruciating happening, but the subtleties of the emotions.

And that is why writing is so important. There are certain things you just can’t photograph, but you want to make a visual language out of it. Photographers can also be good writers. And photographers can be good watercolourists and painters. It is all about taking the time to touch base with all these disciplines. It is surprising how if you invest enthusiasm into it, you can quickly get very satisfying results.

APF: Are you always photographing?

Max: There have been long periods of time when I didn’t photograph. In the literal sense, I didn’t photograph every day. Maybe I photographed one month every year.

But in my mind, I am always thinking about photography. So, I really see myself as photographing in that sense, as it occupies my psyche, my thinking process, my notion of aesthetic, interests and curiosity about things.

In a sense you can say that I have a hidden camera in my mind. Photographers should have that sensibility, like, if you see a situation that could be a really good photograph, that’s when you put it down in your notebook “MUST TAKE THIS PHOTO”.

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A website on my old works

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Reflecting on Zanele Muholi's "Somnyama Ngonyama" at Forum Kyoto: photography as visual activism, re-asserting the identity of queer black African women.

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Walking home with Oka-san

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The day when snow melted even before it hit the ground. 

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Japan is teaching me to see in colour again. Mino-o Waterfall, Osaka. Nov 2016

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Looking at you, looking at me. Mino-o Waterfall, Osaka, November 2016

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Tash Aw writes beautiful essays on the theme of leaving and returning. Here, his essay is accompanied by a photo of mine that is a result of strange coincidence. A privilege indeed, especially since it is a subject matter that is close to my heart.

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Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"My mother hurried to explain the truth: no one was opposed to my being a writer as long as I pursue academic studies that would give me a firm foundation. The doctor minimized everything and spoke about the writer's career. He too had wanted one, but his parents, with the same arguments she was using, had obliged him to study medicine when they failed to make him a soldier. "And look, Comadre," he concluded. "I'm a doctor, and here I am, not knowing how many of my patients have died by the will of God and how many because of my medicines." My mother felt lost. "The worst thing," she said, "is that he stopped studying law after all the sacrifices we made to support him." But the doctor thought this was splendid proof of an overwhelming vocation: the only force capable of competing with the power of love. And more than any other the artistic vocation, the most mysterious of all, to which one devotes one's entire life without expecting anything in return. "It is something that one carries inside from the moment one is born, and opposing it is the worst thing for one's health," he said. And he put on the finishing touches with the enchanting smile of an irredeemable Mason: "A priest's vocation must be like this." I was dazzled by the manner in which he explained what I had never been able to clarify. My mother must have felt it too, because she looked at me in slow silence and surrendered to her fate. "What will be the best way to tell all this to your papa?" she asked me. "The way we just heard it," I said.

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“In Japan, moreover, I wanted to put another daydream to the test: the vision I had always cherished of living simply and alone, in some foreign land unknown. A life alone was the closest thing to faith I knew, and a life of Thoreauvian quiet seemed most practiceable abroad.” - Pico Iyer, The Lady & The Monk.

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Windows and Rain

A year ago, I had the privilege of meeting Geoff Dyer, whose monumental work “The Ongoing Moment” has deeply influenced the way I look at photographs and write about them. I knew I had to embarass myself once and for all, by reading to him a few paragraphs of my writings which I crafted in the few minutes he gave us during the workshop he conducted. And it had to be on a photograph I had so flippantly taken of a rain drop streaking across a large window pane on the bus I was traveling to Singapore from Kuala Lumpur to meet him. It read, “Like thousands of others, this is a photograph of windows and rain. A window typically represents hope. Its squareness frames our vision, gives us a purpose to look at, or perhaps, even provides us with a glimpse of the future; what lies ahead. But here, the rain drop that has streaked across this window, has cracked our vision, like a glass now broken. It has disfigured the picture we have all along thought we understood. And like cracks to a window, it merely grows larger with time. What begins as a splinter; it takes root amd deepens the cut as it goes. Left untreated, it turns into a gangrenous vein. The question is, how do you treat a broken glass? Any concerted effort to seal it with tape would only highlight the cracks even more. And of course, it is as though I am speaking about a heartbreak.” I deleted the photograph but kept the scribbled notes as a reminder that there are dreams fulfilled despite without ever being dreamt of in the first place. There will be many more to come.