Category: Uncategorized

A bit late in posting, but here’s some shots from a shoot I did for Bedsheets Magazine a couple months back.

Tonight I board a night train to the Laos border cross into Vientiane for Chasing the Ghost of Karl Marx. Follow the progress at www.chasingtheghost.net/blog.

A few weeks back I posted some shots from a project I’ve been working on exploring the Southeast Asian obsession with light skin. While this standard of beauty exists throughout all of Asia, in ethnically diverse Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, it affects people and society much more severely than in more homogenous societies like Korea and Japan. In Southeast Asia the economically and socially empowered urban class has, thanks to ethnic reasons, lighter skin than the disenfranchised, poorer rural class. Thus in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam the standard of beauty serves to reinforce social and economic distinctions which fall upon ethnic lines. The White Project uses photography to discuss this issue. In this project I have Southeast Asian people of a variety of ethnicities, national origins and skin tones paint their skin artificially white and then photograph them in black and white, pushing the standard of beauty to such an extreme that it becomes a mockery of itself. Yesterday I did a third shoot for this project (round one, in Thailand, can be found here, while round two in Cambodia can be found here). Here is a sampling of the results.

(click images for full size lightbox view)

While in Cambodia working on Chasing the Ghost of Karl Marx, I did some shooting for the still-untitled White project I posted about a few weeks ago. Here’s some of the results.

Jasontoniowoerner.net has officially changed form, from photoblog to full-on portfolio site. Take a look at the new commissions and art / travel sections in the menu above, and check back in coming weeks for the addition of film work as it gets scanned and uploaded.

In a few weeks time, this eponymous web address will be host to my online portfolio. At the moment, however, I find myself distracted from the task of getting all that together by the fact that I’m traveling in Vietnam with the little sister. Laudable though it would be to simultaneously travel AND put together a portfolio site, in its stead I offer the following: a photo blog of my trip through Indochina with the L.S. Take it, and don’t complain.

-J.T.W.

PS – this photo is entirely unrelated to traveling in Vietnam. I just happen to find it soothing, and hope you will as well.