Unleash the Ents - Ta Prohm (Day 7 - Part 2)



Let me start by saying that I have never seen Tomb Raider.[1] But apparently part of it was shot here. 


And if not TR, it was only a matter of time before something was shot here. It is so visually unique, providing such sublime contrast and a visual portal to wonder, that it seems like it could carry a thin narrative almost by the sheer weight of its visual novelty and juxtaposition.


When I found out that a work trip to Cambodia was likely, all I knew was that Angkor Wat was the thing people recommended in Cambodia. And ever since I missed out on the waterfall and the golden frog in Guyana, I try not to miss out on ‘the thing to see’ when I cross a lot of time zones for work. But tacking a couple days onto a week long work trip (which is closer to 8 days once you add travel) always seems intractable, despite my wife’s consistent and unbelievably generous openness to it. So I checked out a couple books on the region…and when I flipped to the page on Ta Prohm, I remember thinking “I need to make this happen.” Worth it.


The irony[2] of Ta Prohm is that the restorers essentially gave up on it. It was so overgrown that they decided to leave it in its ‘original state’ as a kind of ‘observational control’ so tourists could see what one of these temples looked like before it was restored (if they ran out of other things to do). But the creeping figs ‘flowing’ over and through the ancient temple rocks became iconic, second only to the profile of Ankor Wat itself.


One interesting note was the consistent friction I felt between two modes of experiencing this remarkable resource. These modes of experience seemed to generally correlate with certain ethnic associations, but I couldn’t seem to write that post without unhelpful ethnic generalization, so for the purposes of this discussion let’s call these two groups the “claimers” and the “discoverers”. One group of individuals (the “discoverers”) seemed consistently frustrated as they tried to snap people-free pictures very short temporal window between the constant stream of people (the “claimers”) taking their turns posing in front of the object of interest. 


The “discoverers” wanted to capture the illusion of remoteness.[3] Other people contaminated their pictures even though high human density was part of the experience as we were getting to experience it. The other mode put the value on personally inhabiting the object…becoming part of literally every image worth capturing. In the first case, a person-less picture was the evidence of the value of the experience as the value of the experience was set by scarcity (“I was there and got to experience something rare and beautiful”). In the second case, the value of the experience is in the personal association (“I was there, see, there I am”).
_______
[1]I remember when it came out that there was talk about Angelina Jolie’s breasts being animated (er digitally enhance) and my thin inclination to see it based on subject mater evaporated.
[2]Aihctbk (an abbreviation from my main blog for “as it has come to be known”)
[3]If you peruse the pictures in this blog, you will not have to wonder which group I fell into. And it was actually the process of repenting of my frustration as a cultural particularity and recognizing that I was frustrated with the posing tourists for my own sin of inauthenticity that got me thinking about this.

No comments:

Post a Comment