The Fireworks Baptist stems from my long-term ethnographic studies of Taiwanese culture. When I try to take portraits of people on the site of many folk events or activities, I find myself fascinated by their vital yet deadpan delivery of emotion. And The Fireworks Baptist is a collection of such portraits. The portraits of Yanshui people, whom I call the firework Baptist, were taken after they left a lot of fire prints on themselves with/within the beehive fireworks.
Note: By global standards, southern Taiwan has few truly exceptional geographical or cultural features. However, it does boast what is probably the most extreme and exciting pyrotechnics event in the world: The Yanshuei Fireworks Festival, also known as the Beehive Rockets Festival. Firework Baptist dressed in full protective gear stand in front of walls of firecrackers. When the beehive erupts, rockets will start to shoot horizontally out of the beehive. Wherever Baptist stand, fireworks will scream like tracer bullets, over their body. They put up with the pain to join in the celebration.