Jake Catlett Photography

New Years and Doorways

A couple of weeks back I went to Luang Prabang in Laos for the Lao New Year celebrations. If you’ve ever heard of Songkran in Thailand, it’s really similar to that. Traditionally all the Buddha statues and furnishings would be taken out of the temples and washed by the community during ceremonies and parades. Young people would also wash their elders hands in a symbolic show of respect. Nowadays it’s become a tourist attraction, more noticeably recognized for crowds of people standing in the street flinging water at everybody, often with food coloring mixed in, and also people rubbing and throwing something like talcum powder all over each other, and rubbing pot grease on each other’s faces. The Lao New Year festivities are far more relaxed and low-key than in Thailand, however they can still get a little hectic. There’s a big parade with hundreds of kids dressed up in traditional outfits, and everybody shares food and alcohol with everybody else. If you’ve never done it before, especially if you’re young, it’s a blast and an experience you’ll never forget. If you’re closer to 40 than you are to 20, sober, carrying several thousand dollars worth of equipment and trying to work it’s not so much fun.

April is a terrible month to shoot in Laos, it’s usually very hazy, hot as a furnace, at least this year it was raining intermittently, and when there was direct sunlight the light was so hard that it was even more difficult to work with. Now imagine my anxiety when somebody has thrown a bucket of water on my camera just moments after it got a fistful of mysterious white powder thrown on it, and I’m sitting there watching something that like looks like dough clump up and drip off of it. I must say, the experience was more work than it was play, but I got lots of material I’m really happy with, and that’s all that matters. I put up a new gallery for Lao New Year on my Laos Photo Library site. Go check it out.

After a week in Luang Prabang and another week working with my photos and working my day job I took a bit of time to wind down, and now it’s a four-day holiday here in Vietnam. Under normal circumstances you’d find me off somewhere else, but I’m going to take some time to work more locally and get some good Saigon material, and work more on marketing. While going through my material from the last 6 months or so I realized I’ve got a really nice set of shots of windows and doors, so I put together a new gallery of doors, windows, and assorted decorations on old houses and pagodas in Laos and Vietnam. For the near future I’ll probably be making shorter posts and adding more galleries of stuff I get around Saigon. So check back soon, I’ll make announcements for new galleries and other stuff I post!