Snap Stories: Photographing Yangon’s Circular Railway
Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘Photographing Yangon’s Circular Railway’ was published in January 2014.
I boarded Yangon’s circular railway with a lot of ideas and anticipations circling in my head. One of my self-imposed assignment in Myanmar, when I bought a ticket to Yangon was to photograph the everyday Burmese life. From preliminary research, I realized that one of the best places to see it unfold was the suburban train that touched through the markets and villages around Yangon. There is usually a bustling economic activity in a system that connects an urban center with its surroundings, and I expected it to manifest in front of me inside the circular train.
At Yangon’s Central station, where the train start’s its loop, the nearly empty train contained commuters heading to nearby stations and vendors hopping in and out selling savouries, fruits and betel leaves. We chugged through relatively unpopulated sections of Yangon that alternated between greenery, industrial areas and semi-urban populations.