- Padaung Woman of Burma
We were all eager to see (meet) the women of the Padaung tribe. Their habit of wearing heavy brass rings to elongate their neck intrigued us as it does everyone who hears of it. Our family of Padaung women ran a shop in a small floating village on Inle lake. They were weavers and merchants.
The Padaung are a part of the Kayan people who live in Northeastern Burma. The rings are most likely intended to make the women look pretty. They do not really elongate the neck, but instead they compress the collar bone, pushing it downward. When the women are old, they remove the collars and after a few days, their neck muscles adjust.
We got to the Padaung women’s shop at midday and even though we shot inside the shop, the light coming in the windows reflected the bright sun on the lake water. There was not a speck of ambiance.
The women were used to posing and they never stopped. I wanted a natural look, or a sense of the primitive or else a formal pose, one that I had seen done by a professional photographer. My requests fell on deaf ears. I never got the shot. That’s why I distressed this shot. It makes it less quotidian. Don’t you love that word? It means something that happens daily or in other words it is an ordinary shot. I learned it from my daughter.
The woman in the foreground is the matriarch. She was very pretty and seemed sweet and gentle. She was eager to please us and not a bit pushy about selling her fabric. I did buy some old Buddhist prayer books as well as a length of cloth for a longyi. I like to wear my longyi. Mine has ties at the waist and I don’t need to hitch and adjust it all day long as the Burmese do.