Living in the Shadow of Mount Bromo’s Wrath

Living in the Shadow of Mount Bromo’s Wrath

Nature, third prize stories

December 24, 2010

Cemoro Lawang, Indonesia. A Hindu devotee offers prayers at the foot of the volcano. Mount Bromo volcano, a popular tourist attraction in East Java, Indonesia, began to show signs of activity in November, with a major eruption on 19 December spewing stones and ash 2,000 meters into the air. Christophe Archambault speaks about the project:"I shot those pictures while on a year-end break in Indonesia, chasing Java island's striking volcanoes, that took me from the Merapi volcano which also erupted in 2010 in central Java to the sulfur-emitting Kawa Ijen volcano at the eastern tip of the island via the Bromo caldera. I have always been attracted by the nature's wonders and powers and ended up quite close to the ash-spitting Bromo crater on that day of December 2010.Though I was not on assignment in the region, I filed my pictures right away on the day they were shot, all impressed by the Mount Bromo's striking landscape and the sheer strength of its eruption. The ground was rumbling, it was raining ash ... when I saw those (mainly unprotected) Hindu devotees making their way to the crater to make offerings. I decided to follow those fearless people almost up to the crater, but cut short my ascent when rather than ash falling around, I started to see blocks of several kilos being shot high into the air and falling randomly around us. I then pulled out from the no-go zone and returned to the nearby village of Cemoro Lawang, overlooking the entire caldera, where I shot those scenes of what had become the very particular daily life of the local people, de-ashing their roofs or going for some road-clearing work."

Photo credit: Agence France-Press

Location: Cemoro Lawang, Indonesia

Photo Credit: Christophe Archambault

Born in France in 1970, Christophe Archambault studied geography at university. He began his career as a freelance photographer working for French magazines on various stories focused on southeast Asia, from the gems business across the peninsula (through the Mogok ruby mines in northern Myanmar to the stones-cutting world capital of Chantaburi) to Phnom Penh's water festival. He joined Agence France Presse (AFP) as a picture editor in Paris in 2000, then took up a position of photographer/editor for AFP in New Delhi in 2004. Archambault spent four years in south Asia, traveling extensively across the region where he covered the parliamentary election in Afghanistan in 2005, took trips to remote districts of the northern Badakshan province along with UN missions and covered the aftermath of the killing of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto in late 2007 in Pakistan. Archambault was posted as a photographer in Bangkok in September 2008 and covered the developments unfolding in Thai politics from the October 2008 riots to last year's occupation of central Bangkok by the opposition Red Shirts. He was named chief photographer at AFP's Bangkok bureau in April 2010 and since that date has coordinated photo coverage of southeast Asia.