Picture of the Week # 1 – Cormorant fisherman
By Tessa Bunney on 21 July 2012So we have already been in Laos for a week and I have yet to get out the ‘serious’ camera, we have been settling in, chilling out and getting practical things done. Before I came I read this somewhere: The evolution of a documentary project is a journey in itself. And this project sure has already been one of those.
As Noah doesn’t start school until August, next week we are taking a family holiday to Yunnan Province in China, the roots of this project, retracing part of my previous trips and going further up north towards Sichuan and Tibet.
My first visit to Yunnan province was in early 2008, just before we returned to UK from Vietnam. Only an hours flight from Hanoi, and after several months in the flat landscape of the Red River delta I was desperate to see mountains and hills again. I also chose to visit this area because I wanted to meet a cormorant fisherman.
Actually this picture was taken on a later visit to this area because April is the closed fishing season in an attempt to conserve dwindling fishing stocks caused by fishing with nets, cormorant fishermen are a dying breed. This was the largest fish he caught that morning.
By then I had fallen in love with the landscape and Field, Forest and Family was born. I have spend the last few years travelling in various parts of south west China working on this project and then ended up in Laos, but thats another story!