Project Myanmar-Pure

Is Myanmar my opportunity to unite illusion and reality?! Photography to me is a fabulous instrument for communication because it is powered by illusion as well as reality. Learning how to use both at the max enriched my life in many ways. But since my visits to Myanmar, capturing reality became what I love more than anything else. Zapping from the results of long working days at my photo studio, creating perfect images of products or models with all thinkable tools, to the impulsive images from a first trip in Nepal some decennia ago, I feel - looking back - that sometime somewhere in those years my urge to find the purity in human beings was conceived. Since then a visit to Burma - now Myanmar - where the surreal, commercial western world was shut out for half a century, became a long-lasting desire. During this first Nepal visit with my travelling partner Twan Robeson, I found that this reality outside of my studio, at a top ten position in Holland then, was like magic to me. ´Live´ photography felt like being reborn again, and also appeared to be perfectly in tune with trends in commercial photography, ‘the stage’ being more and more outside. It was not before 2011 I had a chance to go and visit Myanmar for the first time and experience how breathtaking pure a country, that for so long was without western influences, can be. The frankness, individual strength and confidence, but above all the humble way of living up to Buddhism: these qualities so natural in Myanmar are almost unique in Western society. This exquisite and pure life that I found in Myanmar, and hope to reveal through my images will without any doubts be severely tested by the enormous powers of a modern world now bursting in. My hopes are that this amazing nation and especially the energy of its beautiful inhabitants may influence our modern, manipulated lives. With the help of my photo art & books I aim to contribute to that, knowing that a growing number of people is searching for inner peace and a restored balance, for themselves as well as for the complex cocktail of cultures of our World. Together with the ‘photographs that changed the world’ a growing numbers of photo and video documentaries on ancient nations and cultures can participate in the battle against exploiting, starvation, and inequality that still affects a large part of our world’s population. In my 2016 visit of Myanmar I hope to find these people with the same pure strength again, in spite of the unstoppable urbanization they are undergoing. And by showing them how much we in our western world admire and respect their culture, temples and lifestyle, we support them in resisting the exchange of their pure beauty for dictated values ‘from our studio’.