Tom Bourdon: Dayakan Dance

Tom Bourdon was recently in Java, Indonesia where he photographed a traditional Dayak dance near Borobodur. He captured the ambient sound with the new and popular Zoom H1, and put together this audio slideshow. You can also view it here.The Dayak are the native people of Borneo, who live principally in the interior of Borneo, each with its own dialect, customs, laws, territory and culture. Dayaks also live in Indonesia, and have their distinct culture as Tom Bourdon documented.The Dayak were animist in belief, however many converted to Christianity, and more recently to Islam. Estimates for the Dayak population range from 2 to 4 million.Tom is a documentary travel photographer specializing in recording cultural festivals & celebrations across the globe. His work has been published in the...

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Vincent Prvost: West Papua

Photo  Vincent Prvost-All Rights Reserved  I occasionally receive emails from photographers such as the one from Vincent Prvost that make the work of maintaining The Travel Photographer blog feel really worthwhile. Vincent tells me he's been a regular reader of The Travel Photographer blog for about 2 years, and that it has been a source of inspiration to him. He cites my two posts on Grenville Charles and Diego Verges, who documented tribes of West Papua,  as triggering his own photo expedition "Highlands Encounters" to this remote part of the world. That's what this blog is all about...to inspire photographers to explore...

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James Morgan: People of the Coral Triangle

James Morgan features the People of the Coral Triangle, a well made documentary on the Bajau Laut, on his website, along with other multimedia projects such as the Eagle Hunters (previously featured on TTP), and fast-paced documentaries of Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. As he explains, the Coral Triangle refers to a triangular shaped area of the tropical marine waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. It is there that 3,000 species of fish live, including the largest fish - the whale shark, and the coelacanth. It also provides habitat to six out of the worlds of seven marine turtle species. The Bajau Laut are an indigenous ethnic group of the southern Philippines, who have migrated to neighboring Malaysia over the course of the past...

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Ramadan: The Month Of Fasting

Photo  Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images-All Rights Reserved The Islamic month of Ramadan started while I was in Bali, and while the majority of the island's inhabitants follow Hindu traditions, there were indications that its Muslim communities were observing it, especially in areas such as Semarapura. Many of the newspapers' photo-blogs such as the Boston Globe's The Big Picture, the WSJ Photo Journal and the like have featured images of Ramadan observances around the world, but the one I liked the most was from The Sacremento Bee's The Frame. In the above photograph, Indonesian women pray during the first night of Ramadan in Jakarta on...

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Joey L. : The Mentawai (The Movie)

Here's a highly recommended 16-minute long movie documentary of Joey L.'s (and his team) excursion into the land of the Mentawai. It starts with the 10-hour crowded cargo ferry ride from Sumatra across the strait to the islands of the Mentawai, approximately 150 kilometers off the Sumatran coast. The excursion took 2 years to plan and prepare, and we are treated to a behind the scenes look at the photo shoots along with snippets of the Mentawai's life. The amount of gear that Joey and his team had to carry was quite significant. This is not a destination where you show up with a couple of cameras and flashes. They had to lug heavy lighting equipment, large reflectors and lightboxes, cameras, lenses, video equipment, generators, food and so forth. The most visible Mentawai tribesmen in the...

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Matt Brandon: Sumatra

Image © Matt Brandon-All Rights ReservedMatt Brandon over at the Digital Trekker just returned from an assignment in Sumatra, and has great portraits to share with us. He traveled to the small community of Sekayu in Sumatra, which is populated by a community of friendly and welcoming Muslim people called the Musi. They live up and down the Musi River that flows through their territory and down through Palembang. Having converted some of his resulting photographs to B&W, he put up a slideshow with music. My favorite one is of this elderly woman...I chose it because Matt managed to expose her face very nicely, and process the photograph just...

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NY Times Magazine: A Cutting Tradition

Image © Stephanie Sinclair/NY Times-All Rights Reserved This Sunday's New York Times Magazine brought us an 8 pictures photo-essay by Stephanie Sinclair titled "A Cutting Tradition" which accompanies an article authored by Sara Corbett on female circumcision in Indonesia. I was initially glad to finally see a serious topic addressed by the Magazine in a photo-essay format. After all, it's about the cruel, abhorrent and abominable tradition practiced in some Islamic countries on the pretext that it's condoned by Islam. However, the tradition of female circumcision does not originate from Islam nor from the Qur'an, nor is it condoned by either....

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