PhotoBooks Myanmar (Burma)

This is the first comprehensive publication on India's remote northeast, the area comprising seven states stretching from Tibet in the north to Myanmar (Burma) in the south, among them Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Assam. This area is known as the "Seven Sisters of India". It is a region rarely visited by foreigners where peoples scarcely known to the Western world continue a way of life steeped in ancient ritual. This publication, the very first of its kind, explains and illustrates with numerous high-quality color photographs the various aspects of these fascinating cultures.

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With an informative text, illustrated by 161 stunning color photographs by Jean Leo Dugast, this book documents Burma in all its variety and magic enticing the reader to a journey into the "Land of a Thousand Faces."

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The lush photography of this pictorial study of tribes--many of whom have never been recorded on film--makes it one of the most evocative cultural portraits ever published. As an anthropological study, the 28 tribes of Burma reflect the wide diversity of this nation's races. Richard K. Diran, an American photographer/writer who lives in Thailand, has been visiting and recording the tribes of Burma for the past 15 years. 200 color illustrations.

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At the boundaries of the British Empire, photography pushed at its own frontiers. These two hundred and fifty photographs, published here as a collection for the first time, provide a valuable and very specific record of Burma between the First and Second World Wars, when the British and Indian military had a profound impact on its peoples and territories at a key period in the region's political reassessment and redefinition. The images are selected from James Henry Green's extensive photography of recruitment and slave-release campaigns in the northern parts of Burma. They explore his personal documentation of the processes of contact, change and exchange in the early part of this century, at the frontiers of religion, trade, the military, education and identity. These photographs - ranging from spectacular landscapes to intimate portraits - served Green as documentation of his anthropological and military work, predominantly among the Kachin, Shan and Chin people; they also chronicle his personal journeys.

The pictures taken by Green in Burma form part of the history of a long line of photographers working on the Indian subcontinent from the inception of the medium. These pioneers, mostly amateur and often in official employment in the expanding empire, used the camera not only for their own amusement, but also as a serious documentary tool in the creation of archives relating to contact with little-known peoples. Today, these photographs, in conjunction with contemporary oral histories, are vital tools in the latest anthropological research into the events they record. This comprehensively illustrated record of a vanished time offers a window not only on to a particular people at a particular point in history, but also on to ways of looking, illuminating our own assumptions, fears and desires.

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For hundreds of years the golden stupa of the Shwedagon, the pagoda enshrining the sacred hairs of the Buddha, has dominated the landscape of Rangoon. Since the nineteenth century, it has been the spiritual symbol of the entire Burmese nation. Few countries have a shrine such as this, ancient yet with as much relevance today as it had long ago. It is an unforgettable vision to see the pagoda across the Royal Lakes at sunset or as a golden shimmer against the black night sky. Everyone who has been to Myanmar has a memory of their first visit to the Shwedagon; for all born in Myanmar, the monument is a cornerstone of their life and a guardian for their future. Shwedagon provides a multifaceted view of this magnificent Buddhist shrine. The atmosphere of a visit to the site is admirably captured in Hansjorg Mayer's photographs. The texts, by archaeologist and art historian Elizabeth Moore and Burmese scholar U Win Pe, discuss the history and evolution of the stupa, and are illustrated by evocative old pictures and plans.

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