Snap Judgments
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“I think there is some optimism that things, you know… well, things change.”
Ian Taylor was working in the Canadian film industry when he abruptly left his successful career to embark on a decades-long journey through Southeast Asia. During that time, his life pivoted toward travel, photography, NGO work, and cross-cultural engagement across Thailand, Cambodia and Burma, and more.
Taylor's first immersive exposure to the region began in the early 1990s after enrolling in a Canadian government-sponsored Asian studies program. This experience equipped him with language skills, cultural knowledge, and professional networks across Asia. His initial placement was in Phnom Penh in 1994, just after UNTAC forces withdrew from Cambodia. Though his intended job didn’t work out, Taylor found himself managing the Cambodia Daily newspaper, rubbing shoulders with future luminaries in international journalism, like Robin McDowell and Matt Lee.
In 1996, Taylor entered the advertising world, through a job with J. Walter Thompson (JWT), managing initiatives across Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. At that time, Myanmar was beginning to open to tourism under the military junta’s “Visit Myanmar Year” campaign; Taylor’s early impressions of Yangon left a deep imprint. “It was just exotic as hell to me,” he recalled, noting the city’s lush greenery and lack of development relative even to Phnom Penh.
A humorous mishap underscored how new and disorienting the media environment was there for foreign advertisers, after being a closed market for so long. Trying to meet a deadline of the next day, Taylor’s team was shooting ads for San Miguel beer. They realized that a Burmese character had gotten flipped upside down, and tasked their production house with quickly editing the error… and unfamiliar with Burmese script, they proceeded to flip the entire text upside down!
By the late 1990s, Taylor had stepped away from advertising and leaned into photography. Though he considered photojournalism, he realized he was temperamentally and financially better suited for portraiture and commercial family photography, and came to base himself in Hong Kong. His freelance business flourished in the pre-COVID years, and expanded to New York, London, Singapore, and elsewhere. Alongside this, he did photography for NGO and development projects, including a major shoot for the Asian Development Bank on its green energy initiatives. However, he found that even the most prestigious assignments often entailed logistical headaches, and shaving to navigate unresponsive bureaucracies, poor shooting conditions, and unprepared local partners.
Taylor also made a commitment to volunteering during these years. He says his most rewarding volunteer experience was a multi-NGO project in Bangladesh: over the course of two months, he photographed projects for Helen Keller International, Save the Children, CARE, and FHI 360. “It’s the most unexpected, great place,” he says of Bangladesh. “There’s no tourists!” The experience of traveling to the remote Chittagong Hills gave him insight into how porous and interconnected the region truly is, regardless of boundaries.
But it was Myanmar that intrigued him in the most. “It just was always so unbelievably complicated to me,” he admits. He traveled to Yangon multiple times during these years, and even played in a band at the famous 50th Street Bar. As it did for many, the 2021 coup prevented travel back to Myanmar, but in the summer of 2023, he attended the 40th anniversary celebration of the Thailand-based Border Consortium (TBC), which supports refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. At the event, Taylor proposed volunteering his photography skills.
This led to a major 2024 project in which he visited five of the nine refugee camps along the border. Gaining access was slow and bureaucratic, but once on the ground, Taylor was struck by what he found. Contrary to stereotypes, the camps were not idle or desolate, they were vibrant communities. “It’s just an active, bustling town with everything—kids going to school, shops, markets, agriculture, and tons of people speaking English.” This language fluency among refugees especially surprised him-- as did the comparative lack of Thai spoken in some areas. He credits this vibrancy to the participatory model developed by TBC, where the people themselves have the major say in how things are run.
Yet there are myriad challenges that persit. When USAID abruptly pulled funding recently, it shuttered health clinics and caused critical services to vanish overnight. Taylor straightforwardly states the dire consequences at the time of the interview: “They have food [just] until the end of this month!” He notes that the budget for food allots just 50 cents a day per person, or $15 a month; yet even this was taken away by the Trump administration.
Taylor reflects on the ethics and aesthetics of photography in such settings. He criticized the exploitative genre—often referred to as “poverty porn”— where Western photographers chase extreme images of suffering to provoke pity or win awards. “Too many photographers come in, and they want kids with the flies in the eyes,” he says. Instead, his goal was to show dignity and vitality through portraiture, capturing “the glass half full.”
He also condemns staged photographs, especially of monks in Buddhist settings. “I hate this stuff,” he said bluntly. For example, many photographers manipulate settings—asking monks to hold candles or pose in contrived ways—that bear little resemblance to real monastic life. Taylor prefers spontaneity and authenticity, though he admits that the aesthetic choices he sometimes makes—such as beautiful mountain backdrops to refugee camps—can inadvertently make hardship look idyllic.
Taylor identifies three main goals for his NGO photography: portraits, operations (such as meetings and logistics), and daily life. Of those, daily life is the hardest because of the fleeting nature of activity, especially in the early morning. In terms of portraiture, he identifies speed and the ability to make connections as his main skills. Most of his best portraits are taken in under 30 seconds. He favors shallow depth-of-field, shooting with fast lenses that isolate the subject’s eyes—the windows of the soul. He is meticulous about getting consent and engagement with his subjects, never surreptitiously taking or sneaking photos. “Every portrait, in some way, it’s a collaboration.” His portraits resonate with audiences, and have been reused by NGOs for over a decade.
Taylor’s heart and passion is with communities on the margins. He thrives in field settings, working with a clear brief, navigating cultural nuance, and seeking stories that portray human complexity and strength. His travels have also given him a broader understanding of regional dynamics, including how high-context and low-context cultures interact, a concept he still applies when navigating misunderstandings.
Taylor next addresses the issue of tourism. He remains skeptical of the travel industry’s tendency to package and distort local cultures. He recounts the changes that have occurred along Thailand’s “backpacker trail” and reflects on the paradox that, despite the explosion in tourism, fewer travelers today seem interested in authentic cultural engagement. He longs for the earlier days of slower and more in-depth exploration, lamenting the “human zoo mentality” that some photographers and tourists perpetuate.
In closing, Taylor says, “If you could go to a holiday in the Maldives or something... well, I’d rather go [to a refugee camp]!”