“Where are you going?” I asked the man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He didn’t stop, but he looked back and replied, “And why are you standing still?”
The traveller
City Lights – A photo series
A city is a built environment, a physical manifestation of our dreams, desires, insecurities, achievements and failings. It is inorganic, unnatural in every way, geared towards an ever-expanding capacity to consume, exploit and overwhelm everything to its very limits. It is only acceptable then that we do the same to ourselves. Kuala Lumpur, 31 October …
Remembering Razak Mansions
My first encounter with the residential complex had been accidental, stumbling upon it while tracing the Kerayong River from its source to confluence as part of a documentary project on Klang Valley's river network. The second visit was to photograph the area, and by the third visit, all the blocks had been demolished. The residents …
Imagined landscapes
Kampung Tanjung, Kuala Terengganu The last time I was here, the house was shrouded in darkness. I could barely see the tail light of a motorcycle, streaking to a halt between the stilts. The house stood alone on an empty plot of land, or rather the land around the house had been cleared. I promised …
Shooting a VR documentary
For the past six months I've been working on developing a Virtual Reality(VR) multimedia project titled "Elders of Our Forest". The project uses photographs, film, text, sound, and interactivity to create an immersive experience of being deep within the Malaysian tropical rainforest. The first two components focused on the Royal Belum State Park and the …
An afternoon in Malacca
At a recent live storytelling event, I shared a story about three boys I met on Jalan Ampang, and how that encounter changed my life. I won’t repeat the story here but it ended with a salam and the boys walking away. But wait, what does Ampang have to do with Malacca? I had spent …
Sustenance
Strive not to live with nature, but to be embrace our place within it. A recent assignment brought me to Kampung Pinggan Jaya, Kuching to look at the community ran gula apong industry. For Pak Mahli, work is a daily ritual of slipping into his yellow gum boots and strapping a can of burning mosquito …
An event to remember
Quite happy with my recent purchase of a small booklet of prints from the weekend flea market. I was only interested in the first 7 or so photographs but there was no way to purchase them without tearing the booklet. The negatives were unfortunately nowhere to be found. One booth had a small box of empty …
Seeing red
Another routine visit to the weekend flea market in search of old photographic material. One of the sellers had a small plastic box filled with old photographs. Most of them were vacation snapshots, group photographs at schools, a series with a Chinese master demonstrating some sort of martial arts movement, photographs of a plywood company …
A new year
As the world moved forward into 2018, I made a quiet trip to the past. Such is the joy of working with items that belong to a different age. These negatives must have been from the ‘30 or ‘40s (rough estimate). No markings of any kind to indicate the manufacturer or production date. Only one …
Mahen Bala 