Coffee-table photo books are usually too expensive, space-consuming or indistinguishable in content from the art of the glossy postcard for most of us to consider buying. Every once in a while, however, there appears a publication in this cumbersome format that overcomes all such reservations. Richard K. Diran has achieved this rare feat with his book "The Vanishing Tribes of Burma."
Diran, a resident of Bangkok, is one of those rare people who manages to successfully accommodate their business interests with a long-term creative project. After finishing a course at the California Institute of Art, Diran worked in Japan for several years as a painter before returning with his Japanese wife to the United States, where he completed a stint as a student at the Geological Institute. This served as a prelude to his entrepreneurial trips through Myanmar and Thailand in search of sapphires and rubies.
What is remarkable about this book is not so much the photos themselves as the fact that they were taken at all. From the time the country fell to a military dictatorship under Gen. Ne Win in 1962, the authorities have viewed the trickle of foreigners who enter Myanmar each year with mounting suspicion. The writers, photographers and documentary film-makers who have succeeded in producing telling records of the country have generally crossed its porous borders incognito, often depending, as in the case of Bertil Lintner, the journalist who wrote the classic "Land of Jade," on the protection and good will of hill-tribe minorities.