Myanmar Photo Archive

[4] In a 2019 interview with Photo District News, Birk explained that one reason for establishing the archive was the general lack of availability in the country of records of visual culture.

This exhibition titled "Burmese Photographers" presented 300 images and information on the country's history and the development of photography from the colonial era up to the 1970s.

This programme, "Reinterpret Myanmar's History", provided forty-seven production grants to writers, visual artists, gallery owners, curators and representatives of art organizations to create their own projects inspired by images from the archive.

Following this, Irene: A Burmese Icon presented photographs from the life of an upper-middle-class woman in Mandalay during the years of Myanmar's military regime in the 1960s and 1970s.

"[12] The same year, the Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture, noted that images from the archive brought "the work of local photographers [that] has namely remained unknown until today" into the public view.

"[3] An article in Frontier Myanmar in 2019 reported that the "slow, unpredictable and life-affirming qualities of analogue film photography" was gradually being discovered by young people in Yangon who were more familiar with digital and phone cameras.

These newer generations were discovering, through the archive's holdings, that by 1910 Burmese photographers documented "their own cultural perspective and lived experience to photography.

She asks readers to consider the underlying stories behind the images, and goes on to state that the archive "changed the way photography was valued, collected, and exhibited in Myanmar, and it will be so for years to come.