Journal
Photographing Balinese ceremonies without being a nuisance
Balinese ceremonies are unusually open to photography. Families are hospitable, temples are public, and nobody will generally stop you. That openness is exactly the problem: because almost nothing is forbidden, the decisions about what is decent get left entirely to you, and a great many photographers make them badly.
This is not an argument for staying away. It is an argument for knowing what you are walking into.
The non-negotiable rules
These are not etiquette suggestions. They are the actual rules, posted at temple entrances, and breaking them is a genuine offence rather than a faux pas.
Sarong and sash. Required to enter any temple, for everyone, regardless of what else you are wearing. Carry your own — a loan bin at a major site is not a plan at a village temple.
Do not stand higher than a priest. Height is hierarchy in Balinese ritual space. Climbing a wall or a shrine base for a better angle puts you physically above people conducting a ceremony, and it reads exactly as badly as it sounds.
Do not put yourself between a person and the shrine they are praying towards. This is the single most common offence committed by photographers, and it is committed constantly. The line between a worshipper and the object of worship is not a place to stand.
Menstruating women are asked not to enter temples. This is stated on signs at effectively every temple in Bali. You are free to hold whatever view you like about it; you are not free to ignore it in someone else's place of worship.
Do not use flash during a ceremony. Nobody will stop you. Do it once and watch what happens to the room.
Nyepi. On the day of silence you do not go out, do not turn on lights, and do not photograph. This is enforced, and it is one of the very few things in Bali that will produce real anger.
Asking
Boleh saya foto? — may I photograph? It takes two seconds and it changes the entire nature of the encounter.
The reason to ask is not that permission is legally required in a public place. It is that the alternative — photographing people who have noticed you and decided not to make a scene — is not consent, it is acquiescence, and the difference is visible in the pictures. People who have agreed behave differently to people who are enduring you.
When the answer is no, it is no, and it does not need negotiating.
Cremations
Ngaben is the most spectacular ceremony in Bali and the one that requires the most care. The body is carried in a multi-tiered tower, spun at crossroads to disorient the spirit, transferred to an animal-shaped sarcophagus, and burned. Because it is expensive, families often wait years and then combine into a mass village cremation.
Balinese cremation is a celebration rather than a grieving, and photography is generally welcome — often actively so. That does not make it a spectacle. It is still someone's mother.
Practically: ask the family or the banjar, not a bystander. Stay out of the procession rather than walking in it. Do not photograph the body. And when the burning starts, put the camera down for a while and watch, because you will not understand what you are looking at otherwise.
The lens question
There is a persistent idea that a long lens is the respectful choice because it keeps you at a distance. In practice it does the opposite. A 200mm from across a courtyard lets you photograph people who have not seen you, cannot object, and had no opportunity to agree — it removes the encounter entirely, which is the part that makes it consensual.
Working close is more exposed and more honest. People can see what you are doing. They can wave you off. The photographs are better because you are in the situation rather than surveilling it.
Where to stand
Behind and to the side of a congregation, not in front of it. At the edge of a procession, not in it. Low, when you can — kneeling puts you below the people you are photographing, which is both a better angle and the correct posture in a space organised by height.
And stay longer than the interesting bit. Most photographers arrive for the peak of a ceremony and leave when it ends. The hour beforehand — the preparation, the offerings being assembled, the waiting — is where the actual life of it is, and there is almost never anyone else photographing it.
Reciprocity
If you have spent a morning photographing a family's ceremony, you are in a relationship, however brief. Take contact details. Send the pictures. Actually send them — the number of photographers who promise and do not is the reason the promise has stopped meaning much.
If you have photographed people working — a market, a stall, a warung — buy something. It does not settle the account and it is not meant to. It is the minimum acknowledgement that the exchange was unequal.
The point
The reason to get this right is not only that it is decent. It is that the pictures are better. Photographs made from a distance, by someone who arrived for the spectacle and left when it finished, look like exactly that — crowded, diffuse, and about the event rather than the people in it. The alternative requires being present, being seen, and being there longer than is comfortable, which is most of what separates a body of work from a set of photographs of a ceremony.