Joel Halpern brings pieces of Laos to Madison

By Katie Gilbert
Library Communications

Joel Halpern has, by most standards, led an extraordinary life. He has traveled around the world, from Southeast Asia to the Arctic Ocean, bringing a camera with him to document his experiences.

Now he is sharing his experiences in a partnership with the UW-Madison Libraries to digitize approximately 3,000 slides of Laos. The photographs were taken in 1957, 1959 and 1969, and show the country’s peoples, its architecture, its natural landscape and its traditions.

Halpern first visited Laos with the United States Agency for International Development, a program designed to improve village life by providing tools, seeds and infrastructure to help develop the farming industry. He lived in Louangphrabang, the royal capital of Laos, and did developmental work, as well as hosting visiting congressmen from the United States through the USAID program. Halpern received his degree in Russian at Columbia University and did his doctoral dissertation on Serbia but also had a degree in anthropology, so the program was a good fit for him.

"Since I had already had my Ph.D. in anthropology, taking notes and studying the Lao valley people as well as the hill tribes was a very natural thing to do and this, of course, is very much reflected in my photographs," Halpern says.

Halpern also visited Laos in 1959 with the RAND Corporation to study the Lao government and upper class, including the king and his court. In 1969, again returned, this time as the chair of the Mekong Seminar of the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group, a committee of academics and area specialists who advised the USAID program. On this trip, Halpern knew about the conflicts in Vietnam and distanced himself from politics by participating in development projects and he helped build dams on the Mekong River for generating electric power.

"I thought this was an opportunity to become acquainted with a country which I would not ordinarily have the chance to visit or go to. Anthropologists then liked exotic places, and I thought it would be a bit of a challenge and indeed it was," Halpern says of the trip in 1959. "But I did not go out there with the idea of fighting communism but rather with the idea that this was an opportunity to experience another culture, another way of life and maybe, in an economic assistance program, to do some good in helping the people with their economic and social problems."

Halpern toted his camera on all three trips, taking photographs not only of rural and city life, but of special events such as the millennial celebration of Buddha’s birth, the Lao New Year festival and even the wedding of a princess.

His slides reflect a time of transition from a traditional period to a more modern one. During the late 1950s through 1970s, the political structure changed from rule by a monarchy to rule by a Communist government. Some of the slides portray rituals of the royal family while others document a trip to several villages that Halpern took with one of the princes. The royal family was taken to the northern part of the country and imprisioned, where they eventually perished.

"For Americans, it is quite a colorful panorama of events that I was able to witness and to photograph," Halpern says.

The Digital Content Group is digitizing the slides, which will later be donated to the UW-Madison Libraries. Halpern chose to donate these slides to UW-Madison partly because of Wisconsin’s large Hmong population and partly through a recommendation made through UW anthropology professor Katherine Bowie. Halpern’s colleague mentioned his name and desire to put slides online to Bowie. Bowie contacted South and Southeast Asian Bibliographer Larry Ashmun and arranged for a program of digitizing slides and archiving research materials through the Libraries.

"Professor Halpern['s contribution is] very significant because he was really the first American anthropologist who, in this case, was not a missionary, in Laos, really doing some research." Ashmun says. "A lot of the people that he has captured in images or written about in his film notes … may be ethnically Lao or ethnically Hmong. … [And] we happen to have one of the largest groups of Hmong in America in the state of Wisconsin, so it kind of tied in with our state very nicely."

[ Return to Newsletter ] [ Return to Top ]