Judy & I are back from a visual storytelling workshop in Cambodia. It was through Jim Cline Photo tours, and we were on our third tour with the company's Asia tour guide, Karl Grobl. The other tour group leader was Bob Krist from National Geographic. We had to each do a project, and produce a video story. Ours was about the Last Mahouts in Angkor Wat, as the elephants are moved to a reserve in December. Here is the description:
In December, 2019 the remaining elephants in Ankor Wat will be removed to a reserve, leaving several of their handlers, the mahouts without their way of life. International pressure has lead to this move after one of the elephants died, but upon our investigation for this video we ended up believing that moving the elephants wasn't necessarily the best for them. They average forty-five years old, and this has been their way of life for decades. We saw no evidence of mistreatment, and in fact found that the elephants were checked by a veterinarian every week. Elephants have been a part of Ankor Wat for centuries, and in fact, did the heavy lifting to build the temple. They remain very embedded in Khmer culture.
The video is under three minutes in length:
Another interesting project was about rats trained to find land mines. They are so light they aren't blown up, and by smell they can detect where they are. Land mines still injure an average of three people a week in Cambodia.
I also produced a brief slide show of some of my best still photos of the trip: two minutes in a very complex country, severely traumatized by Pol Pot, war with the Vietnamese, and the continuing threat of land mines. Yet Cambodia is a beautiful country with friendly, gentle people; and they embrace both centuries old traditions as well as modern advances.
This has been quite a year for my photography: In February I was selected to be part of a team of photographers with the Jimmy Nelson Foundation to document the Hadzabe, the last hunter gatherers in Tanzania. Then this summer a photograph I took at Denver's Cinco de Mayo was selected to be one of thirty-five to be exhibited in a collection called My Colorado, selected from over 4,000 entries. The exhibit is in the A Concourse of the Denver International Airport. I also was accepted into two juried shows, and won third place in one of them, an exhibit of Colorado photography. And finally, I won first place in the wildlife division at the Colorado Mountain College Art Show in Vail.
