Sunday, June 9, 2013
Travel Photography ASIA: Amazing faces & places discovering Yangon, Myanmar.
Exploring and discovering Yangon, Myanmar…
the faces and places.
the faces and places.
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Photo above: This old Buddhist Monk in the market of Yangon is probably suffering from a skin condition called Vitiligo, a condition in which white patches develop on the skin, due to destruction of pigment-forming cells known as melanocytes.
Yangon also known as Rangoon, is a former capital of Burma,
Yangon as it is called now has a population of over four million and
continues to be the country's largest city and the most important
commercial center.
Interesting to note is that Yangon has the largest number of colonial buildings in Southeast Asia today, a Photographers haven with its busy markets and very interesting Dock/Harbor area.
But most impressive is the Shwedagon Pagoda that has existed for more than 2,500 years, making it the oldest historical pagoda in Burma and the world.
Interesting to note is that Yangon has the largest number of colonial buildings in Southeast Asia today, a Photographers haven with its busy markets and very interesting Dock/Harbor area.
But most impressive is the Shwedagon Pagoda that has existed for more than 2,500 years, making it the oldest historical pagoda in Burma and the world.
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
At the Shwedagon Pagoda, the stupas during a full moon, Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
At the Shwedagon Pagoda, Buddhist Monk meditating near very large Bell, Yangon Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
At the Shwedagon Pagoda, gathering of visiting Buddhist Monks
Yangon Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
A teenage girl worshipping at the Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon Myanmar
According to some historians and archaeologists, the pagoda was built by the Mon people between the 6th and 10th centuries CE.
The gold seen on the stupa is made of genuine gold plates, covering the brick structure and attached by traditional rivets and the crown or umbrella is tipped with some 5,448 diamonds and 2,317 rubies.
But if you like action and watch hard working-man then a trip to the Port of Yangon situated on the Yangon River is a must. Here is where the real hustle and bustle takes place, dock-workers unloading small and large boats with all types of goods.
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Hard at work, Port of Yangon situated on the Yangon River, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Hard at work, Port of Yangon situated on the Yangon River, Myanmar
Another
interesting place for a visit is the Yangon Circular Railway the local
commuter rail network that serves the Yangon metropolitan area. The
39-station loop system connects satellite towns and suburban areas to
the city. The railway has about 200 coaches, runs 20 times and sells
100,000 to 150,000 tickets daily.
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Boy playing inside the Railway Carriage, Yangon
Circular Railway, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Railway station in Yangon, Circular Railway, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
On the way to Insein inside the Railway Carriage, Yangon Circular Railway, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
On the way to Insein inside the Railway Carriage, Yangon Circular Railway, Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Young child on the Yangon Railway station platform
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
On the way to Insein inside the Railway Carriage, Yangon Circular Railway, Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
On the way to Insein inside the Railway Carriage, Yangon Circular Railway, Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Young child on the Yangon Railway station platform
During our last GD Photo Workshop we took a short but memorable trip for about an hour, passing by villages and observing the lively and colorful life of the rural Burmese people en route.
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
At the Insein station about 45 min from Yangon,
Yangon Circular Railway, Myanmar
We disembarked at the small town of Insein, meet with the friendly locals before returning to Yangon to explore the amazing downtown of Yangon exploring Chinatown and Little India.But Yangon has so much more to offer besides the sights mention above, an amazing city, with its Buddhist monasteries, shrines and temples, I continue soon and talk about this another day.
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Sisters at their small store in Little India, Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Red teeth from chewing Beetle nut, shoe vendor in Little India,
Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Muslim Boy in downtown Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Street scene in down town Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Street scene in down town Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Chicken feet…market in downtown Yangon, Myanmar
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© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Slippers in the down town market area, Yangon, Myanmar
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Slippers in the down town market area, Yangon, Myanmar
So why you don’t join us in June 2012 for an incredible Journey to Myanmar where we discover the undiscovered and explore other unique places seldom visited by others.
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
A very happy Nun at a Monastery, Yangon, Myanmar
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
A very happy Nun at a Monastery, Yangon, Myanmar
Copyright all Rights reserved. Mandatory credit with image use:
© Gunther Deichmann - www.deichmann-photo.com
Amazing faces…Yangon, Myanmar!
Burmese women’s legs in the media
In July, authorities in Myanmar suspended Popular Journal for a week after it repeatedly published racy pictures of models, like these two, on its centre spread:
Although these sorts of photos are increasingly commonplace in the
country’s burgeoning private print media, which is rushing to catch up
with its counterparts elsewhere in the region, officials still appear to
take umbrage when a real or imagined line is crossed. Popular
seems to have learned its lesson and since resuming publishing has—for
the time being at least—reserved its pages for more fully clad ladies.
While Popular was off the stands, Living Color ran a feature article on youth styles and “traditional” culture. The writers provide data from a couple of loose surveys on youngsters’ attitudes towards old and new-style clothes, and give a considered assessment of local trends towards the types of clothing that teens in nearby Bangkok have worn for years. The editors have peppered the article with photographs of young women baring their knees and thighs on street corners, at festivals and in beauty shows, making quite clear that the fashion fuss is much less about spiky haired boys than it is about skimpily dressed girls.
Is the appearance of Burmese women’s legs in the media and other public spaces a genuinely new or shocking phenomenon for people in Myanmar? Are these the legs of change? Or are they multiplying visually but signifying nothing?
To put recent trends in perspective, the National Library of Australia has a collection of serials that goes back to the 1950s, including the long running Myawadi magazine, which—since Popular was not around then—can be used as a barometer of sorts. Let’s start with a couple of covers from 1958:
If Burmese women’s legs were fully exposed and in print over a half a
century ago, a decade later they were not. By the mid-1960s, the
sexualized portrayal of women was out. They were the fabric of a new
socialist economy, as was the fabric on their bodies. Models were still
attractive, but their hair was cut short or tied back, their outfits
no-nonsense. There was work to be done. On the cover of Myawadi, peasant women wield their sickles energetically, while students get the better of chemistry:
Into the 1980s, and the socialist iconography had worn thin. Female
models are by this time much less businesslike. They lounge around,
casting vague feminine airs, wearing digital watches and sporting disco
hairstyles, but their clothing is still conservative; hemlines rarely
get past the ankle, if they appear at all:
By the turn of the century, new publishers were pushing stodgy
monthlies into the corners of the newsstands, replacing them with
cheaper and flashier weeklies. Myawadi has soldiered on, and
after a period of jeans and singlets, its editors have reinvented the
magazine on the side of “tradition”, with covers like these consciously
rejecting the mini skirt in favour of a constrained, authorized female
archetype:
Anthropologist Monique Skidmore has written (in Women & the Contested State,
Skidmore & Lawrence, eds.) that in Myanmar “there is a certain kind
of regulation and control of women’s bodies mandated by the state in an
attempt to satisfy [the] perennial quandary for male dictators” about
how to manage women’s subversive power while also shoring up the
masculine state’s defences. Yet the billboard queens flirting with
modernity that she wrote about only a few years ago already seem chaste
when compared to the new generation of centre-spread princesses. The
women of pulp journalism and Korean television, not those prim refined
types on the cover of Myawadi, are the rage. Htet Htet Moe Oo,
yesterday risqué, is today passé. Hip hop culture now holds sway. As for
what’s next, who can say?
[This post is provided by the National Library of Australia as part of our Book Zone feature. For further information on the featured publications contact Nick Cheesman at ncheesman@nla.gov.au]
While Popular was off the stands, Living Color ran a feature article on youth styles and “traditional” culture. The writers provide data from a couple of loose surveys on youngsters’ attitudes towards old and new-style clothes, and give a considered assessment of local trends towards the types of clothing that teens in nearby Bangkok have worn for years. The editors have peppered the article with photographs of young women baring their knees and thighs on street corners, at festivals and in beauty shows, making quite clear that the fashion fuss is much less about spiky haired boys than it is about skimpily dressed girls.
Is the appearance of Burmese women’s legs in the media and other public spaces a genuinely new or shocking phenomenon for people in Myanmar? Are these the legs of change? Or are they multiplying visually but signifying nothing?
To put recent trends in perspective, the National Library of Australia has a collection of serials that goes back to the 1950s, including the long running Myawadi magazine, which—since Popular was not around then—can be used as a barometer of sorts. Let’s start with a couple of covers from 1958:
[This post is provided by the National Library of Australia as part of our Book Zone feature. For further information on the featured publications contact Nick Cheesman at ncheesman@nla.gov.au]
‘Myanmar Pussycat Dolls’ get ready for LA – Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0629/After-Aung-San-Suu-Kyi-girl-band-symbolizes-a-changing-Myanmar
YANGON – Since Myanmar (Burma)
formally ended military rule in March 2011, getting an interview with
long-detained opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been a sort of
rite-of-passage for foreign journalists visiting here.
The Nobel Laureate’s recent winning of a seat in Myanmar’s Army-dominated parliament and current high-profile European tour are being taken as further signs that the government is maintaining its reform drive.
But there are other signals that the country is changing for the better. And with those changes come new items on the visiting journalist’s to-do checklist.
Over the past year, the Me N Ma Girls (hoping there’s no need to explain the obvious pun on the country’s name), a pop/dance act made up of five young Myanmar singers and dancers, have appeared frequently in the international press.
“We appreciate all the media who interview us,” says Ah Moon, a 21-year-old singer and dancer from war-torn Kachin state in the country’s north. She recently finished a Russian language degree and speaks fluent English with an Americanized twang.
Successive stories have branded the ladies as emblems of cultural change and taboo-lifting in what was one of the world’s most oppressive political regimes. The girls, perhaps wise beyond their years, seem wary of being typecast as some sort of cultural fable or cliché, rather than aspiring pop superstars in their own right.
“Yeah, we’ve been in a lot of articles, it’s been great,” says Kimi, 24, an ethnic Chin from the northwest of Myanmar. “But, sometimes it’s like ‘can we practice now?’” the girls say, feigning good-humored weariness, while gathered around a laptop in Ah Moon’s family apartment in Yangon.
In between pouting and posing for photos, and gossiping in Myanmar language, the girls peer over the shoulder of band member Htike Htike, a graphic designer in her spare time, while she works on a new album cover design. “I did the cover for our first album,” she says.
The pay-off from all the coverage is a chance to go to Los Angeles later this year to record some tracks for the new album and take a shot at making that apparent quantum leap that has so far been
too much for most Asian pop acts trying to break into Western markets.
“It has been very hard for Asian acts to score in the West, but they have a chance because the story is compelling, they look great, and have the right disposition for success,” says Daniel Hubbert, Chairman/CEO of Powermusic, in an e-mail.
When the girls head stateside, they’ll record at Mr. Hubbert’s studio. Musically, he says, “I would categorize the girls as a pop/dance act, musically akin to a Pussy Cat Dolls.”
If that’s the case, then the Me N Ma Girls have as good a shot as anyone at making the East-West leap.
After all, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, possibly the most famous Myanmar citizen, has been described as an ideal link between East and West, an Asian Buddhist speaking the Queen’s English and the language of democracy and rule of law and who raised a family in Britain.
“She is like another mother for us,” says Cha Cha, 22, also an actress with 14 movies already released, speaking of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The country’s reformist President Thein Sein comes in for hearty praise too. Wai Hnin, the quietest of the five girls, chimes in. “Thein Sein is amazing,” she says, “everything is changing now here after the end of the military government.”
The girls aren’t getting too big for their boots or forgetting their roots, however, despite their success to date and hopes for the future. “We don’t try to be too sexy, or go too far from our culture,” says Ah Moon, adding that “we all still love our traditional dress.”
Me N Ma Girls, l-r: Ah Moon, Cha Cha, Htike Htike, Wai Hnin, Kimi.
The Nobel Laureate’s recent winning of a seat in Myanmar’s Army-dominated parliament and current high-profile European tour are being taken as further signs that the government is maintaining its reform drive.
But there are other signals that the country is changing for the better. And with those changes come new items on the visiting journalist’s to-do checklist.
Over the past year, the Me N Ma Girls (hoping there’s no need to explain the obvious pun on the country’s name), a pop/dance act made up of five young Myanmar singers and dancers, have appeared frequently in the international press.
“We appreciate all the media who interview us,” says Ah Moon, a 21-year-old singer and dancer from war-torn Kachin state in the country’s north. She recently finished a Russian language degree and speaks fluent English with an Americanized twang.
Successive stories have branded the ladies as emblems of cultural change and taboo-lifting in what was one of the world’s most oppressive political regimes. The girls, perhaps wise beyond their years, seem wary of being typecast as some sort of cultural fable or cliché, rather than aspiring pop superstars in their own right.
“Yeah, we’ve been in a lot of articles, it’s been great,” says Kimi, 24, an ethnic Chin from the northwest of Myanmar. “But, sometimes it’s like ‘can we practice now?’” the girls say, feigning good-humored weariness, while gathered around a laptop in Ah Moon’s family apartment in Yangon.
In between pouting and posing for photos, and gossiping in Myanmar language, the girls peer over the shoulder of band member Htike Htike, a graphic designer in her spare time, while she works on a new album cover design. “I did the cover for our first album,” she says.
The pay-off from all the coverage is a chance to go to Los Angeles later this year to record some tracks for the new album and take a shot at making that apparent quantum leap that has so far been
Cha Cha gets ready for rehearsal (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
“It has been very hard for Asian acts to score in the West, but they have a chance because the story is compelling, they look great, and have the right disposition for success,” says Daniel Hubbert, Chairman/CEO of Powermusic, in an e-mail.
When the girls head stateside, they’ll record at Mr. Hubbert’s studio. Musically, he says, “I would categorize the girls as a pop/dance act, musically akin to a Pussy Cat Dolls.”
If that’s the case, then the Me N Ma Girls have as good a shot as anyone at making the East-West leap.
After all, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, possibly the most famous Myanmar citizen, has been described as an ideal link between East and West, an Asian Buddhist speaking the Queen’s English and the language of democracy and rule of law and who raised a family in Britain.
“She is like another mother for us,” says Cha Cha, 22, also an actress with 14 movies already released, speaking of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The country’s reformist President Thein Sein comes in for hearty praise too. Wai Hnin, the quietest of the five girls, chimes in. “Thein Sein is amazing,” she says, “everything is changing now here after the end of the military government.”
The girls aren’t getting too big for their boots or forgetting their roots, however, despite their success to date and hopes for the future. “We don’t try to be too sexy, or go too far from our culture,” says Ah Moon, adding that “we all still love our traditional dress.”
Htike Htike working on her design (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Ah Moon looking thoughtful (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Saturday, June 8, 2013
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