Ed: <clipped> I had learned a small vocabulary of Bahnar Dega words and was able to photograph in Bahnar villages because I could speak a tiny bit of the language. At the time we called these people Montagnards but Dega is the accepted term today. We used to take them B&W prints of the pictures we took of them a week or so after we had photographed and these were hugely popular. They were people only beginning to use metal and undoubtedly none had ever seen themselves in a mirror except perhaps then our jeep mirrors. One day we had the idea to take a color Polaroid camera and surprise them with instant color pictures. To our amazement they considered these to be vastly inferior ... nearly worthless. It was not an issue of print size because we had been taking 4x5 and 8x10 B&W prints and they loved them all. I am fairly certain that many of these villages had never seen a photo before and especially of themselves. In our minds color prints were a superior choice that we were offering them but to them B&W prints were more special. thanks for sharing this fascinating account of your experiences - not sure what this will mean to me yet, but it's filed in the memory bank ;) >We have chosen not to have TV the past 4 years because it seems such a blatant distorter of reality, or at least to get used that way for economic purposes often to the exclusion of art and science. When we stay in a motel it is disturbing how easily we get re-addicted though. It seems to me that TV offers a form of selectable reality reinforcement that is quite dangerous, gotta agree with you on that - no TV for me, I do love stories though and revel in a good movie, but I watch the ones I choose for entertainment purposes when I feel like it. My brother in law tried to stop my sister watching TV for she developed a perculiar reality after whatever she watched, and was in a constant state of yearning for excitement and 'happiness'. It was bizzarre, but she really seemed to lose her grip on the world.
