A Morning at Prasat Bayon
A Photo Essay
I could hear the hard rain coming down as I walked through the narrow, tumbled hallways at Prasat Bayon, near Angkor Wat, Cambodia. It also dripped down my neck or poured over me when I moved from one section to the next, or peeked into interior courtyards looking for photos to shoot.
Amazingly, nearly an hour after sunrise, I was still alone at this, my favorite of the Khmer temples around Siem Reap. It’s known as a mountain temple, building from low-lying outer walls like the Cascade foothills to a single, Rainier-like peak. There’s a majesty and beatific peace to the faces carved into its towers, most likely because they are repetitions of King Jayavarman VII, and it’s good to be the king.
***
I had been to Siem Reap before, and had dutifully watched sunrise at Angkor Wat with hundreds of others. On this trip, I was looking forward to solitary time while everyone else was having their unique sunrise experience. My tuk-tuk driver, Sam, was incredulous that I wanted to leave the hotel at 5 am, and go straight to Bayon. “Not Angkor Wat?! For sunrise?! It’s very beautiful!”
“I know!” I shouted back, over the wind and loudly puttering motorcycle engine, “But I’ve done it before, and I want to be alone somewhere else!”
Once at the temple, still in near-total darkness, we agreed that he’d come back to get me around 8. I assumed that would allow me enough time to get the photos I wanted, and with any luck avoid hordes of tourists, and the storm I could feel in the air. One of my favorite things when traveling is early morning time to myself in my destination. I walk empty city streets, watch vendors set up market halls, hike in forests, and drive through mountains with nobody but the birds around. It gives me a chance to meet the location on my own terms, to photograph the underlying basis of a place.
At Prasat Bayon, completely alone after Sam’s tuk-tuk faded from hearing, not even a guard dog around, I did what I always do when I want a photo shoot to mean something to me — I spent a minute looking around, breathing in the smells of damp jungle and early cooking fires, listening to a Southeast Asian cicada that sounds like a band saw tearing through a steel beam, and letting the humidity soak into my skin. I guess you could call it a prayer of sorts to intercede with the great god Nikon for just one beautiful photo that has never been seen before.
I could just make out an impression of the towers. I don’t believe in the existence of non-corporeal entities, but 500 million years of animal evolution have taught my nervous system that nothing good happens in the dark when you’re alone, soft and armed only with an 8 lb. club. My spine felt charged, and all my nerve endings were overtuned. I can certainly empathize with those who feel a need to attach that sense to something such as spirits or devils.
I shook off the nameless dread and set my camera on my tripod, knowing that my first pictures weren’t going to be much at all. At 5:42 am, near the equator, the sky was nearly black, so I made dark, moody pictures that were terrible. One of my favorite things about shooting so early, though, is that the light changes astonishingly quickly, so that by 5:46 there was enough light to start making dark, moody pictures that didn’t suck. And by 5:51, colors on the ground became clear, with the green of the grasses, mosses and trees contrasting beautifully with the red of the earth and blue-gray of the stones. By 6:05, 20 minutes before the sky began to glow behind the trees, I had full color, with the blue-gray resolving into a subtle beige-brown, and yellow lichen standing out against that.
Here’s a funny thing, as I go through the 153 pictures I made that morning, I suddenly realize that I was so captivated by the temple, the stones, the mosses, the rain, and the cairns that people love to build wherever loose stones are lying around, that I didn’t make the one picture I had previously thought the most important to get. When I’d been to Bayon before, I worked at getting a Picasso-inspired photo that showed Jayavarman VII’s likeness from two directions simultaneously. But in all the photos I shot that morning, I have exactly one that is clearly about the stone portrait, and that single image only contains a single face. It’s a good picture, at least.
The sky got lighter and lighter, and as the storm was still coalescing, the sun slipped through a crack in the clouds at the horizon and made the bottom of them glow in pastel oranges, yellows and blues. Every dragonfly in the jungle took off at this moment to hunt down mosquitoes and flies and such, making a gorgeous, alien sky scene. In the 45 seconds it took me to shoot 9 pictures of the dragonflies and clouds, the crack slipped closed, and though the sky was bright, I lost all the glowing yellow.
That gave me time to focus more on using the contrast between light outdoor spaces and dark interiors, or between contrasting colors, such as red-orange soil against bright green leaves, to create drama in my photos.
As always happens, most of the pictures aren’t notable. An idea that looks passable in the viewfinder turns out to be nothing special, or the idea is bad from the start, or of four similar shots, either all are equally bad (or good), or only one variation has all the pieces in the right alignment.
A few, though, make me stop scrolling through them in the first or second edit and think there’s something to it. I’d seen the maintenance ladies, or perhaps just devout Buddhists, cleaning up a Buddha shrine in an intersection of walkways just before a temple entrance. I thought about taking pictures as they swept up the leaves, lit the incense, opened an umbrella above his head and left young coconut offerings, but I’ve always thought it rude to make pictures of people going through their day-to-day work. My primary exception to this is fellow artists. I’ll shamelessly photograph a leather crafter, a sculptor, a weaver, where I wouldn’t photograph a construction worker or a street sweeper or a guy eating a sandwich on a park bench. So I hung around the area until they had finished, and I am so glad I did. The contrast of the garish, artificial colors of the Buddha’s accoutrements with the soft, natural stones and ferns, the balance of all the elements in the scene, and the care taken to protect him from the elements make for an image that is remarkably peaceful, considering all it shows.
As I was making perfect balance with the Buddha, I felt the first fat rain drops hit my arms and neck. I debated staying out in the rain, with my umbrella to protect the camera, but that’s always fraught. Holding the umbrella while making adjustments or changing lenses is so awkward that it strips a lot of the pleasure I get from standing in the rain, and shooting those pictures that you can’t get by hiding from the world. On this morning tranquility won out over pictures in the rain.
***
As I lined up an interior shot of a series of doorways and a neglected shrine, my meditative reverie was broken by a woman’s shrill yell to her husband to “Come here! Come…here!” Gah. That was worse than the cicadas. I glanced at my watch and was surprised to find that it was 7:15. As it was just the one couple so far, I knew I could squeeze out a little more time before it would get too crowded to peacefully shoot the bones of the temple.
Happily, the husband went there fairly quickly, and his wife stopped sawing through steel beams. I saw them once, while setting up a shot down a rain-drenched space just wide enough for one person. They glanced into the space, to see what the Photographer with a Big Camera was shooting, decided it wasn’t interesting, and moved on. It’s surprising to me when people don’t spend any time on the spaces between the Important Things, because it’s in those spaces that the interesting things happen. It’s the back hallway where senators make agreements. It’s the darkness behind the stage where the musicians gather their thoughts. It’s where Oz the Magnificent makes his magic.
After that, I could hear the shouts and exhortations to “look at this,” and “did you see that,” mostly in Russian, but with some English and French as well, and my waits for others to clear rooms became unbearable, so I opened my umbrella and stepped into the rain. I decided to just use one lens (my 50mm, f/1.4, which may very well be the best single lens there is for DSLRs and 35mm cameras) to try to capture the drama of the downpour. The sky was so bright that the raindrops looked like photons streaking down against the dark, wet, stone.
A tour bus pulled up and disgorged a small army dressed in $1, pastel ponchos. I got a couple nice pictures of them looking like a watercolor rainbow going into the temple, and knew that my morning was finished.
I headed out to meet Sam, and he wasn’t there. Since I hadn’t paid him, I wasn’t too worried about it, but it was a little frustrating. No coffee, and only a granola bar so far, and I was getting tired and hungry. Most surprisingly, no hawkers were out yet, or I could have at least bought some tea or a bottled water at a ridiculously inflated price (it might have been as much as it would be in a grocery store in the US). They were probably waiting for the Angkor Wat crowd to make their way over, in about another hour.
A tuk-tuk splashed up in a rush, “Are you Mister Brian?!”
“Yes.”
“Sam had a problem! He sent me! He told me you will pay $5! Back to [name of international hotel chain]?!”
Well, the new guy knew all the right details, so I jumped in. We made it back to the hotel in time for me to join my wife and friends for breakfast before heading into Siem Reap for a long day of massages, cooking class and iced espressos.
