By Eric Greene
The war-torn history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, makes for quite the story. The country’s long and painful ride toward modernity has been slow progress of events that don’t make a lot of sense. Like, how can a nation so rich in natural resources have one of the least developed economies on the planet? A big factor is the ongoing ethnic conflicts among the people living within Myanmar’s borders, where colonialism and post-colonial circumstances confined a bunch of drastically different cultures and everyone was told to play nice. Top that off with five decades of Military rule over a pariah state and you’ve got a full-on war territory that’s been closed off to the rest of the world. The last few generations have lived through severe human rights oppression under dictatorship by the military junta. A half-ass skeleton of modern government structure was established in 2011 and the borders began to open (slowly) to the rest of the world in 2012. Geographically, the place is a chunk of paradise, encircled by Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Laos, China, and a long stretch of bleach-blonde coastline on the warm Indian. It’s sure nice.
This brings us to Daniel Zvereff, a New York City-based photographer with an itch for sketchy passport stamps. Daniel came up as a skateboarder from Portland, who dipped his feet in the big leagues, filming video parts that led to some of the most adventurous editorial trips the skate media world has ever attempted. Places like Russia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and eventually Myanmar. By the time Daniel rolled into Yangon in 2011, he had become a photographer, though he might not admit it. Myanmar made such an impression on him that it sidelined his skate career and transitioned his focus toward the arts (our words, not his). He returned to Myanmar in 2015 to document the cultural shift that is evolving daily as a result of the border breaking open to international tourism. Daniel is a traveler in the realist sense of the term. The following is a photo essay and conversation about his two very different trips to Myanmar.
“Most of Myanmar is affected by rolling blackouts. I was riding in the back of a truck, heading to the city center of Mandalay and was able to capture these two riders with a car’s headlights from the opposite direction. There weren’t many cars on the road at that time and motorcycles are still illegal in Yangon today, as far as I know. The car culture had exploded in my most recent visit. Almost every car is brand new and there are traffic jams everywhere.”
What’s your background story with photography?
I’ve always done photography. I shot all through high school and when I started travelling to skateboard, I would take photos wherever I went, just to document my travels. My first trip to Asia was in 2007 when I went to Thailand. I was really young and told my mom I was meeting friends there, but I wasn’t. It was a really eye-opening experience to realize I could go anywhere and be able to meet people and find somewhere to sleep.
What is it about Asia that has led you to do so many trips there?
It’s not just Asia. All my family is Russian and they fled to China during the Communist Revolution. I wanted to follow that trail, so I went and did the Tran-Siberian Railway by myself. I don’t speak Russian, but I started learning on that trip. I ended up going on a skateboard trip there with a bunch of other skaters who I hadn’t met before.
So you went on that trip as a skateboarder rather than a photographer?
I was a skater, so was there to get tricks for my video part, but I also took photos for myself as a secondary thing. The photos from that trip are nothing great, but I’ve continued to go back to Russia and travel more. I eventually realized that photography was more important to me than skateboarding.
How recent was the transition to focus on being a photographer?
I’ve only been trying to push my photography for the last year. I always told myself I wasn’t ready and wanted to travel more. I never went to college and I think you can carry that as a sense of insecurity. Like, what did I do? I just went skateboarding all over the world, which is pretty fuckin’ cool, but you question if that was good enough, you know?
So why not pursue skateboard photography?
Honestly, I’ve never met a skateboard photographer who seemed really happy in their profession. I was always on the other side of the lens and seeing how skate photographers operated kind of turned me off of it. Like, do you want to be a 35-year-old skateboard photographer going on trips with a bunch of 20-year-olds who think they know everything? I also think, at least in terms of American skateboard media, that the photography is required to follow the same look. Every other aspect of photography wants your look, but skateboarding wants you to mimic one style and get in with the right crew. There are pioneers, like Atiba [Jefferson], but everyone else seems to copy that style. That’s fine and cool, but it never made me want to get a fisheye and a bunch of flashes to shoot skateboarding.
“Bagan experienced over 400 recorded earthquakes between 1904 and 1975. The last major earthquake was in 1975, damaging many temples, such as the Bupaya, which was left irreparable. Today there are 2,229 temples and pagodas, where there were originally more than 10,000. Most of the temples are in Old Bagan. In the ‘80s or ‘90s, the government forcefully relocated the villagers to what is now New Bagan, citing treasure hunting and looting as the reason. My first visit was really special. It was quiet with only a few people there and we were dropped off at a random place in the middle of nowhere at 5 a.m. to see the sunrise. I had no idea what the temples looked like, but could see the structures looming in the darkness. It felt extremely surreal and peaceful. We climbed up a temple and waited for the light to reveal the landscape. This year, I revisited the same site and more than 50 people sat waiting for the sunrise, talking loudly, gloating about their travels, and some were watching action movies on iPads without headphones.”
You came to New York as an illustrator. How did that evolve into photography?
I still do a lot of illustration. When I was 18, I started doing daily drawings on my website and some basic HTML coding. I’d just draw random shit and was getting a couple hundred thousand hits a month. That got me into some big art and illustration design publications and then I got hired as an illustrator for Zoo York. That job ended up killing my career as an illustrator, but it brought me to New York, which changed the whole game. The economy crashed and I lost my job, and that got me more focused on photography. I met a very successful commercial photographer named Craig Cutler when I was traveling and he ended up hiring me as an assistant. That was a big education on the technical aspects of photography.
Do you consider yourself a travel photographer?
No, I don’t.
It’s easy to generalize mainstream travel photography as being what you see in Conde Naste or National Geographic, whereas you’ve done a great job of creating your own style that’s different.
Most travel photography these days seems like it portrays these very beautiful and polished images that represent travel. It’s like you’re trying to sell the place. Like, look how blue the ocean is and look how green the trees are because whatever you’re looking at needs to seem better than where you are. It’s like there’s pressure on the photographer to sell this lie about how beautiful these places are. It’s not my instinct to make things look perfect. Most of the beautiful places are untouched, where a lot of the people are usually poor and have a pretty shit life, so it doesn’t seem fair to make it look like it’s better than it really is.
That’s a good point. A lot of your work is portraiture. What’s your approach to capture those kinds of images?
Photographing people really depends on the culture and the country you’re in, and how you want to approach it. There’s either the complete portrait, where you’re trying to peer into the subject’s soul or whatever, and the in-the-moment kind of lifestyle capture. I always try to mix the two. A posed photo tends to have people cheese it up for the camera.
What are the people in Myanmar like around a camera?
They’re wonderful. I try to feel the situation to capture the photos I want. It’s not like India, where people run down the street to ask for a photo and then ask you for money. That’s the result of photo tourism. Like, how many aspiring photographers saw Steve McCurry’s shit from the ‘80s, where he’s tits-deep in floodwater and has all these beautiful portraits? You can fly to India easily from anywhere and try to take those same photos. Myanmar is not like that. There hasn’t been enough photo tourism yet to make it seem like a reward. It’s going to happen, but it’s in the early stages right now. In South America, people generally aren’t down with photos. It’s gone passed that to where you’ve gotta shoot from the hip everywhere.
What’s the premise of these two contrasting trips you’ve done to Myanmar?
The first time I went was in 2011 and it was kind of a mind-fuck. We showed up in Yangon at night and it was dark because there was no electricity aside from a few generators. There was this tiny TV plugged into a generator and 30 people were sitting in the street watching a Burmese film on it. There were barely any cars on the roads and the only ones were from the ‘60s and ‘70s. A suicide bomber blew up a train station when I was there and the government cut the Internet in the whole country so whoever was behind it couldn’t report the information.
“A young boy poses for me somewhere in rural Yangon.”
What about the second trip?
I went back again this year and it was a totally different place. There were so many brand new cars on the road and traffic jams everywhere. A bunch of huge hotels were being built and all the electricity was on. I stayed in a hotel with wifi and a flat screen TV on the wall.
Was it hard to get into the country before it was officially open to tourism?
It honestly wasn’t hard to go there before they opened the country. I think a lot of people just didn’t know you could go. We went on a skate trip with a full crew and a bunch of camera gear and it was fine. We flew into Yangon because it was sketchy in the areas around the border to enter by land. We were followed often by the secret police and people would approach us in the streets, risking their lives to pass us notes that asked us to help them cross the border into Thailand. There were no ATM’s in the country, so you had to bring cash and exchange it there. The military government argued that their currency was worth way more than it actually was, so if you exchanged it at the airport, you’d get nothing for it, but if you exchanged it on the black market, you’d get a fair value. Outside of the country, their money wasn’t even recognized as a real currency.
Was it sketchy to travel around for weeks with all your cash on you?
No, it wasn’t. That’s one of the many beauties of Myanmar. You fall in love with the place because if you have a bunch of money in your pocket, people know that if they got ahold of it, they could live for ten years on it, but they would never rob you. Maybe that’s because punishments are so severe, but it’s also because they’re good people. It’s a special culture that I’ve experience almost nowhere else. In most other countries, you’re just a tourist there to look at some temples and no one gives a shit about you, but it’s different there and you feel it right away.
Did you experience anything crazy on that first trip?
Not really. It’s seriously one of the safest places you could visit. One of the skateboarders I was with dislocated his elbow really bad and we couldn’t find a hospital. And we partied one night in this club, where they had these girls doing a runway fashion show, but with choreographed dance routines. We were the only people in there and it was so corny. The club was up an elevator inside an empty building and it was super weird.
Was it difficult to get into the cities before the country was open?
We tried to go into the new capital, Naypyidaw, but were denied when we got there.
That’s the new capital that was relocated from Yangon in 2008?
As far as I know, the U.S. Navy went in with relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis and the people got all paranoid that they would be invaded, so they consulted a palm reader and asked where they should build a new capital inland that would be more protected. They put like 80 percent of the country’s money into building this metropolis super-city. There are multi-lane highways and huge buildings in it, but it’s almost completely uninhabited. We arrived on a bus and got turned around by the military right away. They put us up in this theme park they built, where all the foreign diplomats would stay.
What was a Myanmar theme park like in 2011?
It was a miniature version of the country, built to a smaller scale. All the main temples and cities were designed within the theme park and there were these beautiful new hotels you could stay in for 20 bucks a night. There are these mountains in the north of the country where you can snowboard and one of the general’s sons was really into snowboarding, so they built a shitty concrete skate park in the theme park for the kid. There’s a small skate scene in Yangon and a bunch of the kids followed us to Naypyidaw to skate the park with us. The city is now open to visitors, so I really want to go back again to see it and then to the North.
Were there other tourists there?
There were tourists there in 2011, but more like younger solo adventurers and then some older British expats.
Like sex tourists?
No. I think most sex tourists just go to Bangkok. It’s not like that in Myanmar. It was a British colony, so I think there’s still some leftovers lingering who want to be there. The ones we encountered would be sitting around at night, talking about the good old days and complaining about how things were changing.
Was there a whole different kind of tourism there this year?
The trip this year felt a lot more like being in Thailand. I went to Bagan to watch the sunrise over the temples, where it was so serene and empty when I did it in 2011. This time, there were families watching movies on tablets and 40 European tourists having a loud conversation about how they don’t like tourists. All the temples are now gated off, whereas you used to be able to walk around and explore inside them all. It’s a good thing they’ve changed that because they’re preserving things, but it’s different.
“Waiting on the bus, commuting to work, and sporting the common style of Thanaka. Sometimes it’s a more decorative pattern, but this one is a toned down application. Thanaka is a yellowish-white cosmetic paste made from ground bark and a distinctive feature of Myanmar. It’s commonly applied to the face, and sometimes the arms of women and girls. I worried that I’d see less of this unique aspect of Burmese culture on my second trip, but it was still present and maybe even more prevalent with men applying it.”
Do the local people treat tourists differently now?
It’s a whole different ball game now with the same rackets you see in other Asian countries, where kids try to sell you postcards or whatever. The clothes are different and there’s way more outside influence.
Are your images from the first trip an effort to document how things were at that time?
On the first trip I was there to skateboard and I was only taking photos for my own experience, trying to document the journey. I wasn’t wanting to create any sort of project with the photos. I was broke at the time and the American economy was still wonky, so spending the winter in Asia was actually a good idea financially. I returned this year because I wanted to see the country again before I didn’t recognize it and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still can’t stop. The place to go now is in the North, where they’re opening up a bunch more cities you can go to. It’s a different ethnicity in the North near the Chinese border, so it would be a much different experience to travel there. I was with my girlfriend on this last trip and she wanted to go see some crazy places, so I thought, “I know where we need to go,” and took her to Myanmar.
How impactful is it to be there on the ground and witness how fast things are changing?
It’s a fascinating time in Myanmar right now because two worlds are colliding. It’s a unique moment in history. Before it was special because it was untouched. You couldn’t get Coca-Cola. You had to have their version of everything if you were there. It was like going into the old world. Now you can have it all. The opportunity is there.
And that accessibility is only going to compound from here on.
Exactly. It’s almost like 1970 became 2015 overnight, so how do you think those people feel when someone knocks on their door and says, “Here’s an iPhone, buddy. Send me an iMessage later.” They don’t know what the fuck that is.
Technology must be one of the biggest adjustments.
I was sitting on a bus the first trip there and a farmer sat beside me. I thought, “I’m gonna blow this dude’s mind,” so I started showing him photos of snow in New York City on my phone. He was blank-faced. It didn’t even register to him, so he just turned away to look out the window.
Aside from traveling and documenting, do you do any commercial photography when you’re home?
I don’t do commercial photography because my aesthetic doesn’t lend towards it. That’s more my fault and it’s not that I’m too good for it or anything, but I don’t produce images that showcase product well or work for branding.
What’s your career approach with photography? You don’t sell prints or take commission work that a lot of other aspiring photographers would be all over.
I have more of a long term approach and feel like I’m in the first year of it, and I haven’t produced any work that I think is great. The greatest photographers out there are producing images that are changing the world.
How so?
The right images can teach people about something and change everything. It’s about discovering something and presenting it the right way. I want to tell a really great story in an honest way and in my own style.
Do you feel like you need to continue traveling with your camera and something will just cross your path, and you’ll think, “This is it?”
The travel angle is a result of what I’ve been doing since I was a kid—traveling and skating and searching for shit. But I don’t feel like I need to always be somewhere else. I mean, New York City is somewhere else for most people. Something incredible is happening wherever you are, so it’s about being aware and being open to your surroundings.
See more of Daniel’s work at: zvereff.com
“A young Buddhist monk poses for me at the Shwedagon Pagoda. I didn’t observe many differences between my two trips there, aside from there being more people.”
This article was published in LATER. magazine Issue 8, 2015