I started traveling in Asia because I wanted to get far away from my gene pool and tastefully decorated rooms. Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director at Harper’s Bazaar, was known for his famous dictum: “Astonish me.” And in Asia I really was astonished: I saw things that made my eyeballs spin around in their sockets; I went gaga over the color. I reconnected with awe.
What kickstarted this series was a really seedy $3.50 hotel room in Vietnam. The room was awful, the color was ferocious, the walls were moist and the smell was clammy. The weather was miserable; I was stuck in that room and so bored that I started photographing the place with my Widelux. That room turned out to be a total gift. The camera turned the ordinary into the extraordinary; it almost capriciously turned the crappy into something beautiful. That got me interested in shooting interiors (my Here & There ) which eventually led to shooting In Camera.
I loved finding these old studios; locating them transformed trips into a sort of treasure hunt. Plus I liked talking with the photographers who ran them (this often required a translator). I’ve always had a thing for faux nature, so the painted backdrops were heaven. Poignant. enchanting and idiosyncratic, they varied stylistically from country to country. But wherever they were, they were so aspirational.
What I also found remarkable were the very old equipment and the kinds of props used to create photographic illusion. Sadly, these studios are an endangered species; very few exist because it’s truly now a digital world.
I found these studios in Vietnam, Laos, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Cambodia and China.