M D MorganIn development
A five-day workshop I would like to run, ending on the loudest night of the Balinese year and then stopping dead for the quietest day on earth.
This is the March week of the Bali photography workshop I am developing. It is the same teaching as the others, but the week is built around a date the island sets rather than one I choose, so it is worth its own page.
Nyepi is the Balinese new year, and it is observed by stopping. For twenty-four hours nobody works, travels, cooks over a fire or lights a lamp after dark. Nobody goes outside. The airport closes completely — no arrivals, no departures, for a full day. Streets that are never empty are empty. In 2027 it falls on Monday 8 March.
The night before is the opposite. Each village builds an ogoh-ogoh: a giant papier-mâché demon, months in the making, carried through the streets on bamboo poles by dozens of young men, spun at every crossroads to confuse the spirits inside it, and then burned. It is loud, chaotic, lit by flame and phone torches, and it is one of the great photographic nights anywhere in Asia.
The days would run east and north as the other weeks do — Karangasem first, then Munduk in the highlands with the north coast at Singaraja worked from there — and the week finishes in Denpasar, arriving as the preparations peak.
Days 01–03
Ceremony, market and street work across the east and north, with the evening review sessions the workshop always runs. Through this week the banjar compounds are finishing their effigies in the open — a subject in itself, and one almost nobody photographs because it happens before the visitors arrive.
Day 04
The purification processions to the sea. Villages walk their temple objects to the water, in white, often for kilometres. Long lenses are useless here and short ones are a test of nerve.
Day 05
The last day is spent on the parade — the afternoon assembling, then the effigies moving after dark. We work it as a group and split up as it develops. This is the only night of the week with no review session, for the obvious reason.
Day 06
The workshop is over, and nobody can leave. We spend the day inside editing the week — the best editing conditions I know of, because there is nothing else on the island to do and nothing outside making a sound.
Ngurah Rai airport shuts completely for the day of Nyepi — no arrivals, no departures. Anyone here for the parade the night before is on the island for the day after it, whether they planned to be or not. That is part of why the week is worth building around.
Treat that day as the reason to come rather than the cost of coming. Most people who visit Bali never see it silent. There is no traffic noise, no music, no aircraft, and after dark no lights — which means a sky most visitors to this island never see either.
You cannot photograph out on the street during Nyepi, and we would not. That is the rule and it is kept by everyone, visitors included. The pictures from that day, if any, are made from where you are staying.
Or read the full workshop page — the teaching, the places, and the other three weeks.