For this month’s featured fine art photograph, there are no snow-covered summits on the horizon. Instead, I’m taking you to a mythical destination that has fascinated me for years: the ancient temple plains of Bagan in Myanmar.
Some call it Myanmar, but I still prefer the name Burma. To me, it evokes sapphire-eyed cats, precious gemstones, mystery, and poetry. Behind this choice of words lies a painful political history: in 1989, the military junta officially imposed the name “Myanmar” and discouraged the use of “Burma,” notably by democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Before the journey, I immersed myself in Burmese culture through The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, a novel that stayed with me long before setting foot in this extraordinary land.
In April 2025, I finally discovered one of Southeast Asia’s greatest archaeological treasures: more than 2,500 Buddhist temples and pagodas scattered across barely 50 square kilometers, making Bagan the second-largest archaeological site in Indochina after Angkor Wat.
The trip itself was unexpectedly disrupted by an earthquake. Communications in Bagan were cut off, and tourism had almost completely disappeared. The result was a strange, suspended moment in time. Yet this isolation gave me exactly what I had dreamed of: a silent forest of temples glowing under golden light, like a dreamscape woven beyond time itself.
Every evening, accompanied by my trusted Canon EOS R5 Mark II, I searched for a new vantage point to photograph sunset over the ancient kingdom of Bagan.
Most evenings, nothing happened. Thick clouds swallowed the sun before the light could turn pink. That is often the challenge of the dry season in Burma: the atmosphere is incredible — warm air, haze, smoke, and dust drifting across the plains — but the sky remains so veiled that the light fades without igniting.
But on this particular evening… everything aligned.
A break appeared in the clouds, while dust, heat, and smoke from nearby agricultural fires softened the contrasts and sculpted the scene into something almost painterly. Suddenly, a bath of golden light illuminated the temples, and the lost kingdom of Bagan came alive exactly as I had imagined it for years.
