FRAMED MEMORIES OF YU YU MYINT THAN'S CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

Yu Yu Myint Than is a photographer based in Yangon, Myanmar. Before pursuing photography, Yu Yu was a teacher at a public school until 2014 when she won a scholarship for International Reporting WorkshopShe was awarded a three-month education program at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. From this prestigious award, Yu Yu's love for photography deepened.

Yu Yu worked as a photojournalist for 11 months at The Myanmar Times, but she chose to develop herself as a freelance documentary photographer and joined Myanmar Deitta, a non-profit organization that works to develop resources or programs for local photographers and filmmakers. Yu Yu's proudest moment was when she was awarded by the Magnum Foundation and had the opportunity to study abroad in New York from 2017-2018 and won a scholarship to the University of Myanmar. Masterclass Southeast Asia Photography organized by Obscura Photo Festival in Penang, Malaysia, 2016.

During an online public lecture via Zoom with the theme 'Now You See Me: Developing Personal Works' organized by the Photography Department last June 10, 2020, Yu Yu presented her interest in photographing hidden stories of gender issues, social problems, and human rights. For her, photographs show the power of a personal object as Yu Yu has a strong obsession to capture emotions, memories, and dreams in each of her works. During the session, Yuyu presented four works from personal project which is titled Memory Lane, Letter to Love, Sorry Not to Sorry and Jigsaw. Many of Yu Yu's works are about her memories of childhood trauma and her personal experience of her own fragility.

Yu Yu's photographs seem to depict solitude, loneliness, and hope even though they are done with documentary journalism patrons as their basis. The journalistic documentary character is still inherent in Yu Yu's photo style because he had received photography education from the Magnum Foundation and worked as a photojournalist. What is interesting about Yu Yu's photographs is that the audience does not easily find a correlation between the form of journalistic documentary and the photographs Yu Yu does in his current work.

When she was still pursuing her work as a photojournalist, Yu Yu was still bound by the editor, which had to fulfill the elements of news value, technicality, dead line and so on, but as if personal project Yu Yu's current work is her freedom to create. Thus, she feels free to express her true self through her photographs.