Nursing Mother and Family, Northern Thailand Tribeswoman

This elderly-looking woman actually is a younger mother nursing the

young child, lower right at her hill country village north of Chiang

Mai, Thailand. Apparent age is attributed to ethnicity, growing and

use of tobacco, and constant exposure to the sun. (Also, there is

an open fire within the dwelling for cooking and (when needed) heat,

leading to an interior full of smoke. Your ratings and critiques

are very welcome. (If you give a negative or harsh rating, please

submit an explanatory constructive comment/Please share your

superior photographic knowledge to help me improve my photography).

Thanks and Enjoy! (From My Black and White II Folder). John.

I visited this mother and her family in a village north of Chang Mai, Thailand in the early '90s. She obviously was the mother of the children pictured, and inside her government-sponsored and aided hut (very large inside but rudimentary with an open pit fire) she nursed the child, right bottom. She and her equally old-looking-skinned husband who had a young-looking body both worked tobacco fields of their own on the Thai hillsides under the hot equatorial sun day in and day out taking a beating from Old Sol and smoking the equivalent of packs and packs and packs every day, day and night. Tobacco breaks down collagen in the skin and makes a person look old before their time and (if you believe me) this woman (who looks 60+) can be no more than her early 30s, and maybe less, with the oldest looking skin I've ever seen on a young woman. I've seen similar skin on a dry cleaning worker who smoked who was 40 and a chain smoker who had a 10-year-old daughter, and looked 65+. She had inhaled a lot of "perc" -- perchlorethylene, but I'm unsure whether that chemical had any effects at all.