Cedric Arnold: Yangon Awakening

Photo © Cedric Arnold-All Rights Reserved

I'm really delighted to have stumbled on Newsweek's Picture Dept which features the lovely new work by Cedric Arnold in Myanmar's capital. More photographs are featured on The Daily Beast. I'm a fan of this type of photography, and of Cedric's work which I featured on this blog earlier this year.

The much better laid out gallery on Cedric Arnold's own website is titled Yangon's Awakening, and consists of large format Polaroids of an artist, a poet, a teacher, a student, an office worker, a punk rocker, a forest monk (above)... photographed in front the old and neglected walls of this city, showing the diversity of people, and juxtaposing the traditional and modern Burmese against the peeling paint and masonry of these old walls.

I chose to feature the Polaroid of this forest monk because I came across some of these monks when I walked up and down the path to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda during a photo excursion to Myanmar some 10 years ago, and I recall that they were very reserved, and shy when photographed...perhaps because they were in the midst of a pilgrimage to that sacred site.

These are real Polaroids...not Instagrams and not digital images processed with Alien Skin software and the like.

Lovely work.