I am sitting on a flight from Sydney Australia to Jakarta, Indonesia. Everyone is asleep beside me or watching movies, squinting at the 5 inch screens. I think I have spent 25% of my last three years on planes. But I couldn’t be happier to do it.
I was in Australia doing a workshop. But not just any old workshop, I gave those up a long time ago after having extreme schedueling difficulties / too busy doing commercial jobs. This workshop, however, was Inspire Me ’09, a huge event hosted by Ainslie and Mark Bernoth… The best hosts alive. So holy shit of course I was flattered to say yes.
A typical photography workshop might invite it’s students to come shoot models in a park if they are lucky. However, we had a whole production thanks to the Bernoth’s. We shot girls holding eagles, snakes, or sometimes in front of 57′ Chevi. We shot an African fire breather, and a man with large abs all the cougars in the group loved and even my friend / assistant Willem with his shirt off… All in the name of learning of course. Also teaching was Zack Arias, ‘One Light’ guru and 100% cool dude.
I wanted to release my new lighting DVD I’ve been yacking about, but even after staying up 48 hours straight before I left Brooklyn for Australia, it still wasn’t good enough. I was also worried I was extremely disullusioned from lack of sleep, and may put out a piece of crap by mistake. So I decided it was safer to fine-tune and release when I’m home in late September instead of the end of August.
The hardest part for me here in Australia was not the workshop or eating Vegemite at all though, it was waiting for what my flight screen now says is 1692 miles away.
About a year ago me and my friend Willem were sitting at my kitchen table talking about travels around the world. Willem has lived in Indonesia before and saw a very strange picture once in a store near his village of Tabek, Sumatra. It depicted a hunter/gatherer tribal man with full body tattoos and sharpened teeth. Perhaps it was a depiction of a people that lived long ago. I was hesitant. After some research, we found that this is not the case.
The shamanistic Mentawai are still very real, and remain animist hunter gatherers to this day. Although most have been assimilated by the Indonesian government or missionaries, there are a few small pockets of traditional clans remaining deep in the interior of Siberut. Tomorrow we will be gathering supplies in Padang, taking a cargo ferry to the island and trekking to the remote clans away from the established government villages. I will live with them in the jungle for about 3 weeks, oh, and hopefully get some good portraits too. The shamans will be a great addition to my Holy Men series.
We will be experimenting charging stuff with foldable solar panels. My other friend Cale Glendening will be following our every movement and mistake on camera. He had a terrible flight with a dozen stop overs because we got his dates figured out literally 4 days ago. We don’t care though, we are going to keep our chins high as we splash thru the mud and humidity of Siberut with kilo upon kilo of gear strapped to us.
I hope our encounter with the tribe will not be a confrontation, but more out of mutual respect and appreciation. I hope to gain trust and represent my subjects in images as dignified as possible. The Mentawai have a reputation of being warm and friendly to outsiders. The clans that remain are enduring and have survived on their own for a long time, but are now threatened and fragile. I feel that this way of life will not be around for much longer, so it’s time to investigate in the best way I can. I am not a relief worker by any means, and I am not educated enough to fully comprehend a problem like this. My biggest fear is that my children will grow up in a grey world with only one perspective on reality, one thought process dictating behavior. Although change is inevitable, there cannot be only one way to live, one way to perceive the world- humanity needs diversity to sustain itself. Now I sound like a god damned hippy, but I believe it.
Let’s move on now, this is way too deep a subject for a blog post where I’m planning to post my gangster rap about photography .I am not taking pictures for people to look back on and imagine these people as historical figures, I am going to live it so I can share the story myself. We’ll see what happens.
Wish me luck. Needless to say, I won’t be tweeting.
Joey
