The Thailand Galleries: An Akha X-mas: X-mas Gift

An Akha X-mas Main
The Thailand Galleries Main

As in the Favorites page of this gallery, this woman on the left asked me to take a photograph of her and her baby. I asked my friend about how many photos the people in this village have of family, and it was almost non-existent. She showed one photograph that a family had of their patriarch, and it was a grainy, blurry photo of him already in his sealed casket. Most of the people here don't have photos, not going back three, two or even one generation. On the walls of their houses, they have hung pictures of strangers from magazines and maybe one or two photos they have of family members.

So based on the amount of people I had asking me to take a photograph, I thought, why not set up an improptu studio and snap some pics for posterity? So I took a quick trip into town to buy some color print film, asked my friend to tell people what we were doing, and then snapped the photographs of about 70 people who wanted prints. As I write this in mid-March of 2000, I am preparing for another trip to this village where I will give a copy of each of the portraits to the people involved--they will at least have some photos of what they looked like on X-mas 1999. I am also planning on filing the negatives and a CD-ROM with the scanned photos with an organization that will hold onto them, but first I have to find one who can archive the materials.

Perhaps some day, even generations away, when the entire world has computers and the Internet, the desecendants of this village will be able to look at these photographs and know what life was like then. In the meantime, at least they have one photograph they can show to loved ones.

Brothers	Brother and Sister	Dimples
Mother, Father, and Seven Children
84 year old woman	Man, Daughter (right) and Granddaughter	Mother and Four Children
Husband, Wife, Two Daughters, Grandchildren and Me

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