MYANMAR

Work Series / 2012

Myanmar

All pictures were exposed on film using two Leica M6

Shortly after the opening of Myanmar, 50 years since the military coup and a closed, rigidly governed military dictatorship, I traveled through the country for six weeks and was one of the early tourists when the country «officialy» opened up for westerners. The clash I experienced was a civilizational one, with people living or having lived according to different cirucumstances. It reminded me of the statements of former Soviet citizens who had known and seen nothing other than dictatorship. Samuel P. Huntington has articulated this very decisively. However, in the case of Myanmar, the prehistory of the state, including over a hundred years of colonization and exploitation by the British, is seared into memory and behavior. My journeys were offering me a nuanced perspective on the interplay of history, culture, and individual experience in shaping societal norms and values.

The following collection of images provides a small insight into a formerly closed society and only a small part of a huge country that, even today in 2024, is governed by the military and plagued by civil wars.

«First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man the indivi-dual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative import-ance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. »

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization