Kornography

Photos from tracking gorillas in The Bwindi Impenitrable Forest–which, despite its name is not a locale in LOTR or Zelda, but a National Park in Southwestern Uganda.

Working until insane hours of the morning, I end up driving home through deserted streets. Over the months have come across some interesting glimpses of that which normally goes on while we are sleeping. With this blog, and my own frustration, pushing me, I have taken to keeping my camera in my car, and, overcoming the draw of my bed, stopping and photographing what I see on the way home.

Here is the first installment. I, like you, have driven by late-night construction crews countless times, blinded temporarily by light towers. However recently I have seen an advance in work-site lighting: these floating globes, acting like soft-boxes, cast even beautiful light over the men and their work.

A few images from a series I was working on in the fall of 2007 in Chiang Mai. One of a couple projects inspired by many hours spent out on my balcony on beautiful bright moonlit nights. It was during this period that, for the first time in my life, I found myself taking note of the cycle and movement of the moon. The moon’s pace provided perspective to the sometimes hectic speed of day-to-day life, and given my impending return to the US, a reminder as to the steady march of time.

I just rediscovered these images while preparing for a show in April. Printed as squares, and framed without mats, the images take on an almost modular quality, becoming interchangeable and rearrangeable, losing the very notion of time passing that originally drove me to create them in the first place.

My new goal is to learn a little about the Thai political climate, that which is all around me, yet about which, until recently, I have remained entirely ignorant. In a recent interview, a prominent Thai political pundit reduced the whole thing down to three words: monarchy, military, and bureaucracy. Beyond yellow-shirt-Mondays, posters of the King and Queen flanked by waterfalls and pagodas in every house, and the song between the previews and the feature, the monarchy doesn’t really affect my everyday life. And, knock on wood, I have had little to no interaction with the military, beyond the just-finished-high-school city boys serving their mandatory 6 month service at rural road blocks (read: perennially adjusting their uniforms, ogling the odd attractive female passenger and taking photos with their camera phones of said female passenger). Bureaucracy, however, has been a different story.

Thus, the triumvirate may well better be described as leung(yellow in Thai), leering and lackadaisical, or else saffron shirts, shoddy soldiering, and sheets upon sheets of paper (how’s that for a scatagories score?).
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I know how I am—when someone lectures on about wrongful arrests, limited freedoms, human rights abuses—I know that its wrong, and that it shouldn’t be that way, and perhaps some cursory feelings of empathy, but I can’t make myself get angry. The more impassioned the person gets, the more I remain distant, unable to connect the life I live with these abstract words; sympathy tends to fail when the assumptions one needs to make in order to place oneself in the shoes of another are too demanding, too large of a gap from one’s experiential reality. People tend to attack this dislocation with an anecdote (think politicians’ BS remarks about the conversations they just had with Jane Average in Anytown, USA about her husbands medical bills), but still it tends to be formulaic, and all too frequently continues. I think this is because invariably, the person speaking is him/herself removed, and the anecdote is not his/hers, and it is this second-handedness, this added distance from the events and suffering, that account for the inability to illicit sympathy.

I never thought about how frustrating it must be for these people: committed to a cause and charged with making that cause real for people like me, repeatedly facing disengagement. That being said, in sharing a situation in the world that I have encountered, and which needs to be known, I have thought a lot about getting past the above-mentioned hurdles. All I can do is attempt to relay the feelings and responses I felt to hearing such an anecdote first hand, in hopes of making the experience more real in its second telling… (more…)

“Maybe I should drive,” I said, as images of the terrifying plunge down cliff-hugging dirt roads the night before intercut with Khru Yay leisurely tipping glasses of Karen moonshine down his throat the previous afternoon flashed through my head, not thinking there was any chance of him surrendering his keys.

To my utter disbelief, and faster than I imagined the words could permeate his once again rice-whiskey-soaked mind, a smile broke across his face and he tossed me his keys. I had wanted to drive his truck for some time, nicknamed “The Elephant”, it tore through both foot-deep clay-turned-quicksand and the rock-hard ruts left by that same clay baked in a sun-powered kiln until it reached a consistency resembling concrete. Mounting my stead (or more literally, getting behind the wheel) I headed off back home, concluding another great week spent in the jungle.

On previous trips, I continually oscillated between awe and apoplexy as my view shifted from the unbelievable vistas of jungle-fringed valleys that seemed to extend indefinitely, and the winding, blind-turn addled, sometimes washed-out road the clung to the edges of the precipice. In the dark, one could easily treat the darkness as the unknown and thus remain indifferent to it, but at the wheel, I could not help from imagining the sheer rock faces that I knew lurked mere feet from my tires. (more…)