When the water rises,
the fish eat the ants;
when the water falls,
the ants eat the fish.
Laotian Proverb
These photographs aren’t chasing some National Geographic wet dream of exotic authenticity, they’re tracking the messy, gorgeous aftermath of a place that got carpet bombed with our good intentions and somehow, against all mathematical probability, kept breathing. The shots hit like field recordings from a civilization that decided technological progress was a sucker’s bet and doubled down on existing in three dimensions while the rest of us flattened ourselves into pixels.
Look at that river, brown and indifferent, carrying the weight of monsoons and unexploded ordnance like it’s all the same cosmic joke. The boats aren’t picturesque; they’re functional, scarred, held together by the kind of indigenous ingenuity that makes our subscription based existence look embarrassing. These aren’t poverty porn tableaux for liberal guilt to feast on, they’re documents of people who figured out how to live without needing validation from Palo Alto or Shanghai.
The faces staring back through my lens aren’t performing for the camera. They’re engaged in the radical act of being present in their own lives, which in our current algorithmic hellscape reads like revolutionary praxis. That kid in traditional dress isn’t a cultural artifact preserved in formaldehyde, he’s navigating the same impossible balancing act we all are, just with better textiles and less existential hand wringing about whether his life has meaning.
Those mountains in the background, wrapped in mist like they’re hiding from DARPA satellites, they’ve seen empire after empire roll through, each one convinced it had the answer, the system, the five year plan that would finally make sense of this place. The mountains remain magnificently unbothered.
There’s no redemptive arc here, no triumph of the human spirit, no neat little packages tied with jute twine for the Etsy crowd. Just the ongoing, unglamorous work of negotiating with gravity, weather, economics, and the casual cruelty of geopolitics that turned your backyard into the most bombed country per capita in human history and then largely forgot about it.
The proverb says when water rises, fish eat ants; when it falls, ants eat fish. I knows the water is always moving, and survival means understanding you might be predator or prey depending on the season, the rainfall, the whims of forces so far beyond your control they might as well be weather systems.
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