Ania Błażejewska | Balinese Idyll

Photo © Ania Błażejewska -All Rights Reserved

I should preface this post that some of the photographs are of tasteful nudity, and may be considered as NSFW.

Ania Błażejewska's Old Bali gallery, which only appears on her Polish-language blog, is of set up scenes with models to represent life on the island as it was many years ago, before its becoming a tourist destination. Her photographs are tasteful and luminescent, and the models chosen for this particular photo shoot are all just gorgeous.

Through these arranged scenes, she has recreated a traditional Balinese way of life, with roosters (for the cock fights), the religious offerings (canang sari), the temples, the abundant fruits, the dances, the gamelan, and markets.

This may not be travel photography as such, but it's certainly "time travel' photography with reenactment of what may have been commonplace in Bali in the 1920's or earlier. One can view actual old images here to see the accuracy of the reenactment.

Ania Błażejewska is an established and talented travel photographer who is based in Bali. Her website is replete with gallery after gallery of exceptionally well produced photographs and stories, ranging from traditional tattooing and Catholic flagellants in the Philippines, Theyyam rituals and Kathakali performers in Kerala, funeral rites in Tana Toraja of Indonesia's South Sulawesi, to the powerfully colorful Masskara festival in Bacolod, Philippines which shames the more accessible Venice Carnavale. She also documented the northern tribes of Vietnam and many others in her Photoshelter archive.