[Leica] Film still lives even in Burma

[leicachris at worldnet.att.net (Christopher Williams)]

>From PMA news:

"Burmese photographer uses traditional and homemade techniques for tourist
snaps"


"Burmese photographer Sein Win has spent the last 35 years recording
tourists on 35mm film, the Bangkok Post reports. As tourists approach the
Shwezigon Pagoda in Bagan, Burma, via a long covered walkway, they encounter
Sein Win's darkroom among an array of souvenir stalls. Sein Win comes out
clutching his 1970s vintage Ricoh camera. Within minutes, tourists are
shepherded into the grounds of the pagoda while Sein Win takes photos
against the golden spires. He takes seven shots, getting different angles
and view points. Then it's off to the darkroom, a small wooden cubicle
measuring approximately a square metre. Here the seven frames of film are
removed from the camera and wound into the spiral of his developing tank.
  Temperatures inside the room are frequently well in excess of 100 degrees
Fahrenheit, which is why the film develops so fast, the article says. The
hotter the chemicals, the shorter the developing time. Developed, fixed, and
dried with a hair dryer in about three minutes. "See,'' he says, "no
computer, no minilab. Just me and my developing tank."
  Then the strip of film is inserted into his homemade enlarger which
consists of a tin can containing a light bulb with a lens attached to the
base of the can. Sein Win doesn't use a clock to time the exposures or a
thermometer to measure the temperature of the developer. Both the film and
the prints are developed in the same solution. Then, within another three
minutes, just as the sign in the front of his cubicle claims, the prints are
done to a turn, the article says. While the emulsion on the surface of the
paper is still soft, he etches a personal message onto the image with a nail
before the prints are dried with the hair dryer and presented to the
client."


Chris