Mandalay, Taunggyi and Sagaig

April 2015

Near the end of our journey through the northern region of Myanmar, I switched from shooting in color to back and white, choosing subjects most often for their monumentality (which, given the place, was no insurmountable task, as it is full of monuments of various kind,) for instance: a statue of Buddha standing thirty one stories tall. 

Mr. Arkadin

Orson Welles, 1955

In honor of the filmmaker’s hundredth birthday today, it seemed appropriate to present these frame enlargements and screen captures from his best film, which turns sixty years old itself this year. I understand that mine is a minority opinion regarding the worth of this work, but I also know that I’m in very good company here.  I first saw Mr. Arkadin in 1975 at the University of Connecticut Film Society.  It was the first film by Welles that I saw projected on a screen, and, though it probably wasn’t the best print, it was certainly the best version of it then available, the Corinth version, which remains the one I prefer (though I don’t at all mind seeing the others when the opportunity arises.)  I urge anyone interested in Welles, in his life and work, to see this movie, if it is yet unseen.

 

 

Burmese Pantomime of Barnaby Rudge

April 2015, Yangon, Myanmar
I considered calling this series of photographs Barnaby Rudge after Dickens’s early historical novel about the Gordon Riots, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch (though it still seems appropriate to me despite my inability to explain exactly why)  and would likely be misunderstood in light of the current revolutionary activity in Baltimore.   I doubt that even the few people alive who have read the book would understand the association I intended. (The novel's central character is a bit of a fool who finally finds his true calling in life as the natural born leader of a mob.) These pictures were made a couple of weeks ago in Yangon with the help of some friends there, and employ a few props and masks that were obtained rather cheaply in the street.  The setting is an outside wall of a Judicial Court building a few blocks from where I was staying.  As well as they could, I asked those posing to think of themselves as dancers in a revolutionary pageant.