Well i'm happy to say that i won some awards for my work. It is always nice to have acknowledgment like this from professionals this industry. 2008 Visual Culture Awards

Ehrin Macksey : Gold, Emotive Vision, Light, and Self Portrait ; Bronze, Photographic Story ; Gold, Multimedia ; Award of Excellence, International Documentary

This is a great publication by the very talented Yumi Goto and not because they feature some of my work. Things are changing for documentary photographers and I'm always looking for new ways to show my work and expose people to the stories i have done.

You can sign up and download the publication here: pdfX12

I recently visited Malaysia and was in it's capital Kuala Lumpur. As i walked around the beautiful city i went to one of the many local shopping malls located there. When i walked in i was greeted with a large Christmas tree and Christmas music such as, Joy to the World and jingle bells. Now from my knowledge and from what i have read on Wiki about Malaysia is that Islam is the largest and official religion of the federation.

So this was quite confusing to me. The majority of the people i saw there, that were Malay, were traditional Muslims. Also most of the tourists i saw in KL were from some sort of Islamic background, as all the women were dressed in the traditional all black and you could only see their eyes.

Christmas is a religious holiday celebrating the birth of Christ. At least this is what we are all told.

So to see Muslims walking around in this festive atmosphere was quite interesting to me.

Maybe they don't care? They just want to go out with the family and buy things like everyone else?

To me Christmas has no religious meaning. It is the time of the year where you see your family and old friends that you haven't seen.

I wonder what Christmas means to them?

After spending 5 days in Siem Reap some friends and i decided to go out to the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. We took a friendly tuk-tuk out to the lake and tried to commission a boat for the day. We had been told that the normal price was $45 a day. When we showed up we found out that the local tourism police were running a racket. They were insisting that we pay anywhere between $60 to $100 a day. We walked away and found a nice fisherman who was working on his own and not with the police. Once the Tout saw us doing that he immediately told one of the his fellow tourist officers to come interfere. The tourist officer told us that we have to take one of the "official boats" and that we could not take a boat with the fisherman. Having been in Cambodia many times i never believe what these "official people" say. Most of the time it is a scam. So i asked him to please see his ID so that i know that he was an official tourist officer. Of course he did not have one. Figures.

The so called tourist officer did manage to stop our fisherman from taking us unless we agreed to pay him $25. So we did and then jumped in a boat and tried to enjoy our little trip out to see the people that live on this lake.

The majority of the people living in the lake live are surprisingly Vietnamese. Our friendly fisherman told us that the majority of them stayed after the the war with the Khmer Rouge and have never returned to Vietnam. They even had a floating school that taught only in Vietnamese. My friend Francoise told me that at the time of the fighting between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam many of the Vietnamese Soldiers defected from the military because there was too much fighting at the time. Vietnam had just finished the war with America and now had two conflicts, one with the Khmer Rouge and another with the Chinese. So some of them were tired of all the fighting and decided to stay and live in Cambodia.


The fisherman took us to a remote village about 2 hours away by boat. This village was special due to the it being next to a "floating forest." Many of the people living near or in the floating forest rely on it to provide them the wood, food and money from tourism. The children in Cambodia make you fall in love with the country. Lots of happy smiling faces. Even when they are asking you for some money they do so half hardheartedly and just want to talk with you and have fun.



We later took a smaller boat through the floating village and it was a serene and beautiful place full of bent trees sprouting up from the depths of the lake letting in little rays of sunlight. I really loved this place and was happy we made the trip.

I found out some months ago that my work was selected to be shown at the 2008 Angkor Wat Photography Festival. So now I'm on my way to to Siem Reap, Cambodia once again to meet people and hopefully make some connections in this difficult industry. The body of work they will be showing will be my coverage of Post-Leprosy treatment in Vietnam.

I have to say that i'm quite honored that my work was chosen by both the curators Sujong Song and Christian Caujolle. The other photojournlists chosen to show their work are needless to say amazing. Most of them are quite famous in the photography world and come from prestigious agencies like, Getty, VII and Magnum.

After deciding that i was going to pursue a career in photography and film some two years ago i feel that now more than ever i'm on the right track.

I hope that with more exposure of Post-Leprosy treatment in Vietnam that the kind people that opened their lives up to me for this project will get the recognition, help and resources they need. This is my main love of photography. It has the power to help people and to bridge connections and connect people that would normally have never been known.

After months of meeting different organizations, officials and documenting my 2 stories about leprosy in Vietnam, my work is done. You can see my finished work at http://www.ehrinmacksey.com/Multimedia.html

I have asked a couple of people who are considered experts in the industry to review my work and i happy to receive that they thought very highly of my work.

When you spend so much time both emotionally and physically on a project like this you hope that it truly touches people and makes them want to help or understand more.

Here are some of my reviews below and thanks again to everyone for their support:

Multimedia Shooter

Duck Rabbit - where photography, art, audio and journalism collide

Multimedia Muse

Slug & Lede - Review 1 / Review 2

28mm

Visual Journalist

So tomorrow I'm back to work on my project. Above you can see where I eat lunch and dinner everyday when I'm there. Like I posted before it is .... rural. I'm really excited to go back since now i feel very confident with my new video equipment and I got some addons to my video equipment from my friend Justin. God Bless his little heart as getting electronics and video equipment in Vietnam is quite difficult, at least good equipment.

So I'm out in the sticks again to work more on my epic Multimedia/film. Next week i have to conduct a couple of interviews so I hope I will be able to post more about my trip to Sapa, Vietnam.

I truely can't wait to go back and start working on my video ideas for this project.

Wish me luck.

So it has been awhile since a made a post and it hasn't been for a lack of activity in life. Quite the opposite in fact.

I have been working on my previously posted project like a mad man. Making this storie is requiring quite a lot. I love doing this stuff especially because it is for all the right reasons.

It is funny people ask me how do I get paid for working on personal projects? I said I don't at least not how they think. The payment is the awareness about the people in the project and hopefully the people who view it decide to help in one way or another. That is the only payment needed for all the hours of shooting, editing and interviewing.

Last week I was out in the countryside working the story. I stayed at the Center as it is 40 min away from the closest town. The Center is really in the boondocks of Vietnam. My room was about as simple as it gets. A metal bed with wood on top but no mattress and a pillow. I did have a ceiling fan thank god because it was hotter than the devils toes out there. So here I am in the middle of nowhere and I turn on my blackberry just to see what kind of signal I will get. Surprisingly it shows me that I have EDGE service. Laying in my metal bed I hit my gmail icon to see if it would connect. To my surprise it did. I was surfing the web, chatting and doing email in the middle of nowhere Vietnam all on my phone. This is in fact how I'm writting this post now. Technology just blows my mind sometimes.

At the end of my trip I was waiting at a Bus Station to catch a bus back to Hanoi. Since they don't get many foreigners out in these parts. I was the show for the day. In little less than 5 mins there where grown men, women and children tugging and pulling at me and asking me all kinds of typical vietnamese questions. I had a guy talking to me on my left and he was also touching the hair on my arms with amazement. I had a woman on my right pinching my skin as if it was paint and I was really a vietnamese in disguise. It was all quite comical and I'm sure if some other foreigner was there they would have busted out laughing. None of the vietnamese ment any harm, they were all quite friendly. In their culture, touching and lack of personal space is perfectly acceptable.

Well as I'm back on the bus back to the countryside. Maybe I will catch you online with my blackberry. See you in the digital universe.

Well, I have been working like crazy to get my new websites up. I'm designing one for photography and another one for web design.

On top of that I have finished a new website for a group of talented journalists who I have joined in our quest for freelance multimedia. The website is http://www.ontheroadmedia.com

I very happy with the work I did on this website, it looks simple but is advanced in the navigation and operation.

Besides that I got some crazy skin things happening to me lately. I got smacked in the face with something while driving on the road (motorbike). Then I got some strange rash under my arm. Well things like this are kind of normal when your living in a developing country and should go away soon, I hope.

I attached a photo of my apartment. Nothing crazy or anything just so you can see that I'm not living in a hole.

I'm going to go out for more shooting next week so I will hopefully post some new stuff soon.

Last week I went to the countryside to do some more research into a personal project i'm working on. The setting for the place was beautiful as the newly planted rice was growing and was a lush green. The birds and insects clamor away as the people of this nearly sustainable community work next to them. They grow all their own vegetables, rice and meat and work together to help build houses or to work on other community projects.

I met the director for the community, a jolly, stained and crooked tooth man. He has a kind heart and has worked as a doctor/director for the community for more than half of his life.

He told me about how they had come to receive two more rejections from the outside world. A pair of 9 year old twins who were born with a horrible skin disease called Lamellar ichthyosis or fish scale disease. Their parents had kept them hidden in a dark area of a dirt floor house for most of their lives. The parents must have thought that the skin disease would later go away, but at the age of nine they found themselves abandoning their children at the front gates of this community. The twins were accepted here and treated as normal. Probably one of the few places in the world they would ever feel like that. More than likely they will live out their lives in this community.

The people in this community have lived lives of persecution. Not for something they did or that they could control, but for how they look.

As I listened to the stories and poems of their lives, it immediately breaks down my emotional barrier protecting me and keeping me objective. Their lives were full of isolation, rejection, murder and suicidal tendencies. Only recently in the last 5 years have they felt happiness or that people might care for them.

I spent two days there gathering resources, listening to stories and observing the daily lives and needs of these people. They were so kind to me, a stranger, they are all open and willing to share their life.

On the second day I met up with the poetry club. They read some poems they had written. They were not harsh poems about the hardships they had endured in their life, but poems welcoming me as a friend. After they were finished telling me their poems I was expected to address them. I almost lost it and nearly cried. After 2 days of being consumed by this place, feeling its kindness towards me and seeing the living conditions and deformities of these people, it finally caught up to me. I was emotionally drained. As I'm sure others would be if they listened and saw the same things.

I will go back every week from now until I finish the project. I hope to share more stories later with you.

Thanks for reading.

So a month ago I moved from my house to an apartment. The house was too big for me and the furniture and other things were breaking so I decided that it was time to move to a newer place.



I moved into this great new apartment (I will post photos later). The difference between this new neighborhood to my old neighborhood. More like how the majority of Vietnamese live in Hanoi. So I started to go out and document the area I lived in.



There is a park and a small lake near my house. It is polluted and not kept up with and kind of run down which to me gives it some character.

So here are some photos of that area. Later I will post some photos from the network of allies in which I wander through every day.

So I'm have been studying. Not a shock for those of you who know me. I seem to always be studying. I have found that many people in the industry in which I'm trying to break into are blogging like crazy. Sharing thoughts, ideas, links, projects and their lives. When I first thought about blogging I really didn't think much of it. I would think, "yeah those people have too much free time." But recently, one blog that I used to follow everyday died out of existence. For the last week I have honestly missed it. The author wasn't ranting and raving about this or that, but sharing knowledge and helping with the progression of a new industry and connecting people who would have not been normally connected.

This is really what I think is great about blogging. It took the lost of a blog for me to realize the power of a blog.

For right now i'm going to try Blogger and then later move to a WordPress if it is needed.

So to my friends and colleagues I hope you enjoy my postings.