Without an H

Photography from south-east Asia by Jon Sanwell

Posts tagged ‘portrait’

On leaving Hanoi

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I’ve lived in Hanoi for a long time. I’ve had two spells in the city, the first from the summer of 2008 until the end of 2010, and the second from the autumn of 2013 until now. And now my time here is coming to an end. In a couple of days’ time, I will be leaving Hanoi and moving to Yangon. I’m incredibly excited about the move. I took two trips to Myanmar in 2015, and the idea of one day living there lodged itself in my head fairly early in my visit. Having slowly marinated the idea in my brain for a couple of years, things suddenly started moving very quickly over the last month, as I found myself a new teaching job in Yangon and finally started making concrete plans. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I have a very positive feeling about this new start.

But I will miss Hanoi. It’s been my home for many years, and has shaped me in ways I probably won’t fully appreciate until more time has passed. I’ll miss my lunchtime bún chả or phở gà. I’ll miss my afternoon coffee by the lake. I’ll miss the friends, old and new, that I’ve made along the way. I’ll miss scooting about town on my Honda Wave. I’ll even miss the casual lunacy of the Hanoi traffic. But I won’t miss mouldy March.

I can’t even begin to fully describe Hanoi in words. It’s a truly unique place, and everyone who’s spent any time here has their own take on it. It’s not always an easy place to live, but for all its frustrations and imperfections, there’s something about this city that gets under a person’s skin.

Choosing the pictures to include in this post has been a difficult task. On another day, I would have made a different selection, but these are the pictures I’ve taken in Hanoi over the last few years that most seem to mean something to me today.

Things might be a bit scattered on this site over the next few weeks. I still have some more pictures from my trip to Indonesia to post, some more from Ha Giang that have been on the backburner for a while, and a few bits and pieces that I’ve shot in Hanoi over the last couple of weeks. And of course, I hope to be out and about shooting in Yangon as much as I can, and sharing some of my early impressions. There’s a lot I could write about what I’m looking forward to about life in Yangon, but for the rest of this post, I’m just going to wallow in photographic nostalgia.

Hẹn gặp lại, Hà Nội. See you again.

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Going Solo

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There’s no shortage of spectacular sights in Indonesia: live volcanoes, ancient temples, endless rice terraces. I enjoyed visiting and photographing all of those places, but some of my best memories and – I think – some of my best pictures came from wandering the streets of the towns and cities, and experiencing the everyday life of the country. People, markets, street food, patterns and details: these are some of the things I most enjoy photographing.

Solo, also known as Surakarta, in central Java is my kind of town. It’s a fairly unassuming place, full of warm, friendly people going about their business in no great hurry, and I hope that these pictures capture some of that mood.

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Lazy days in Ubud

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Like Hoi An in central Vietnam and Luang Prabang in Laos, Ubud in Bali is a town that has wholeheartedly embraced Western tourism; the streets are lined with hotels, souvenir shops and restaurants. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, it’s heavily commercialised and a little contrived, but there’s still something very appealing about Ubud and the surrounding countryside. Hindu shrines and temples are squeezed into every available space. The streets are strewn with carefully packaged offering of petals, fruit and rice. Taxi drivers politely offer “transport” to passing pedestrians. Ancient statues are draped with silk or garlanded with flowers. It’s all very conducive to doing not very much at all, a welcome change of pace and scene after the (quite literal) fire and brimstone of east Java.

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Around Borobudur

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A few pictures taken in and around Borobudur town: a farmer sharpening his scythe; rice terraces on the road to Selogriyo temple; a house in the shape of a giant camera; and buddha carvings, large and small.

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Jakarta | Chinese medicine

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Whenever I visit other big south-east Asian cities, I always seem to end up in Chinatown. Bangkok, Yangon, Kuala Lumpur, and now Jakarta. It’s not just the food. These districts always seem to have lots going on, an energy and character of their own.

In Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, there are a number of traditional herbalist shops, selling specially prepared packages of dried or powdered herbs, designed to cure all manner of ailments, to those who don’t trust or can’t afford conventional medicine.

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Jakarta | Five portraits

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What to say about Jakarta? It’s a vast, sprawling, congested mess of a place. A megacity of more than 30 million people with no obvious centre, it’s more than a little overwhelming for the first time visitor. It’s a difficult city to love, especially at first sight, but in between the multi-lane highways and behind the concrete blocks, there are pockets of humanity, regular neighbourhoods where regular people go about their everyday lives. There were moments when I felt like I was in my element – there’s nothing like wandering around a new place with a camera and a 35mm lens. But in between these moments were long periods spent sitting in traffic, or simply looking for a place to cross those multi-lane highways.

I think you’d need a lot of time and patience to really get to know this city. I just spent a couple of days there at the start of a month long trip through Java and Bali. In that short time, I barely scratched the surface of Jakarta. I can’t offer a comprehensive overview of the city with my photographs, but I can share a few portraits, some small fragments of Jakartan life. It’s my way of trying to show the city’s human face.

More from Jakarta, and elsewhere in Indonesia, coming soon.

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