Dublin Camera Club has a documentary group which meets once a month though I haven’t participated in the group yet. A couple of weeks ago the club held a member’s showcase night, and the organiser of the documentary group commented on how good it was to see more documentary-type shots being shown. While I didn’t show today’s image that night, I do consider it to be a documentary shot as well as a straight forward landscape photograph.
I visited Malaysia last July to attend the wedding of two friends – it was a lovely wedding, in some respects quite different to a typical Irish wedding, and in other ways quite similar. I took some lovely photos at it, some of which are on my main website. The wedding was also an excuse for a holiday in Malaysia, and in our case a brief stay in Singapore also.
Towards the end of our trip, we spent a blissful four nights in Tanjong Jara – a resort in Terrengganu on the country’s east coast. Terrengganu is a strict Muslim state, and Tanjong Jara is a luxurious resort aimed at western visitors, which offers a little bit of luxury that seems at odds with much of what surrounds it.
We went on a cycling tour of the area around Tanjong Jara with a guide from the hotel one evening, making our way to the small village of Kuala Dungun a couple of miles from the resort. The village is home to many fisherman who supply product to the resort we were staying in, and other hotels. We cycled right down onto a pier to look at a recently constructed bridge across the Dungun river, which our tour guide informed us was proving extremely beneficial to the area, making access to and from other parts of the state much easier.
With its golden sandy beaches, lovely climate, and a reputation for luxury hotels and resorts, making access easier now is likely to lead to further development of the tourism industry in the future, and it’s easy to wonder if the bridge which seems so beneficial to the locals of the village will prove to be in their best interests in years to come.
With this in mind, I view this photograph as a documentary image of the village as it was that day when I passed through, with the five small boats to the right of the frame symbolic of the village’s main industry, and the shack-type accommodation a strong contrast with the luxury of the resorts that the village supplies with fish and other produce – resorts that may, one day, be the root cause of major changes to this scene.
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