Photographic Images

LAOS : In the Shadow of Change

Within Buddhist culture, October is a significant month. The festival Boun Awk Phansa commemorates the Buddha’s return to earth after spending a three-month retreat in heaven, at the end of Buddhist Lent. This festival takes place on the 15th day of the 11th month of the Lao lunar calendar. To mark the last day of that season, devotees make offerings at temples around the country.  Boat races are held to reclaim the land from the 'Naga' *, chasing them out from fields and streams and back into the Mekong River. The dragon boats are long, narrow canoes with a steers-person who navigates the back of the boat. Alongside the races, street fairs and food stalls are set up on the river banks.  During this night, people get together by the closest river to free hundreds of small boats of banana leaves decorated with candles, incense and flowers. Some photographs in this book were taken during this festival in Vang Vieng.

In Luang Prabang Province, locals mark the end of Buddhist Lent by parading decorated boats through the town to the river, where, at night they are launched onto the river and ceremoniously set on fire as offerings to spirits. The villages around the town build their own large boat for the spectacle, competing to create the most beautiful 'float' for the year. The temples build two boats, one to float down the river, and another to remain on the temple grounds. Photographs of this festival are also included here.

Laos is a colourful and vibrant country, and forecasts suggest that Laos's real GDP will expand by 3.1 to 3.9% in 2023, driven by a rebound in tourism and an increase in trade with its neighbours, supported by the Laos-China railway recently completed. It is however one of Asia's poorist country. The high speed railway, which speeds past villages with water supplied by a street pump, is part of China’s 'Belt and Road' Initiative and is Chinese -funded. However it also increased the Laotian debt to Chinese banks by about 320 million pounds. Some worry that this makes the country even more dependant on, and in debt to, its giant neighbour, which is the case with other countries involved in the 'Initiative'.

Laos has the added long standing problem of unexploded bombs and mines (Unexploded Ordnance UXO) dropped during the American War in Vietnam. At the current rate it will take many hundreds of years to clear all the ordnance, the clearance of which is often hindered by floods and earth movements moving it about.  Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) has hindered the country's economic development. Land must be surveyed before constructing transportation infrastructure, industrial parks or farms, with some projects taking as long as three years owing to unexploded bombs, according to Chomyaeng Phengthongsawat, Director General of the National Regulatory Authority for the UXO/Mine Action Sector.

Each of my images attempts to capture moments containing a narrative in their own right, and can be viewed and understood individually. However the photographs taken as a whole are intended to express a feeling of place and my experience of it during my time spent there during a period of significant change. It is possible that with the great adjustments due to the high speed railway slicing through the country much, might have changed.

*The Naga is the guardian spirit of the waterways and rivers, and is in the form of a beaked serpent living in bodies of water or caves. The river is the source of life as it feeds agriculture and farming. According to the myth the Mekong River in north-eastern Thailand and Laos was said to have been created by two Nāga kings slithering through the area, thereby creating the Mekong and the nearby Nan River