In the sunset era of analogue photography, he travelled the region freelancing for magazines and corporate clients in Asia, North America and Europe. Assignments took him to Afghanistan and Japan and many of the countries in between, including forty-nine trips to Mainland China during the boom years set off by Deng Xiaoping’s momentous declaration that “to be rich is glorious.”
Between 1989 and 1995, Ron made five “tourist” visits to North Korea, each time secretly on assignment for western magazines. His photographs ran on the covers and inside pages of titles including Newsweek, Asiaweek, L’Express Magazine (France) and, what was considered at the time to be the holy grail of photojournalism, the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
For the last thirty years, eagle-eyed goons in Pyongyang have ensured that all photographs of the dictator Kim statues (there was only one during Ron’s visits) portray the twenty-two-metre-tall monstrosities in their entirety.
The rigidly enforced rule only came about after Ron’s photographs of North Koreans bowing reverently to gigantic bronze feet featured prominently in international media. That his only tangible professional legacy takes the form of photographs forbidden from being taken is an irony that does not escape him.
He frequently found himself under citizen’s arrest in North Korea and, despite lying to men carrying guns throughout the region, he was only shot at once (in South Korea, a shotgun-fired explosive teargas canister that passed inches from his kidneys). He also experienced first-hand only one police car chase in China. He maintains that spending a weekend in Bangkok trapped in the grip of the Michael Jackson media circus was as disconcerting as anything North Korea threw at him.
“I took my work very seriously,” says Ron. “But in truth I was a dilettante photographer, in it for the travel, the oddball experiences and the thrills.”
Clichéd
As the digital photography era began to take over, and having written many travel articles to accompany his own photographs, Ron devoted himself to writing full time. In the late 2000s he edited book manuscripts for a Bangkok-based vanity publisher. Many were autobiographical, often sticking to the clichéd formula of the poor, naïve, well-meaning middle-aged foreigner who falls head-over-heels in love with precisely the wrong Thai bar girl.
Years later, Ron decided to turn the story on its head, and the result is Still Blue, his latest novel. It tells the tale of how Tuk, a young Bangkok blues guitarist, falls for precisely the wrong Scottish backpacker. He follows his new girlfriend to Glasgow, where she claims her rich daddy will set them up with a blues venue of their own, modeled after Bangkok’s famous Adhere, the 13th blues bar.
Tuk is already a second-generation bluesman. As a child he followed his father around blues venues in Thailand, and was repeatedly told how, should any opportunity come along to play overseas with big name stars, he should grab the chance with both hands. Sadly, long before that might happen, young Tuk saw his father die from electrocution on a waterlogged Bangkok stage.
Many years later, when the chance to play abroad arises, he is not about to let it pass him by. But he reckons without the failure of his new relationship – and soon finds himself alone in a strange land, facing the shame of returning to Bangkok having failed in everything he set out to achieve.
When he learns that one of his father’s heroes, Taylor Gray, is to headline a small blues festival in the Shetland Islands, he seizes one last opportunity to chase his father’s dream.
Still Blue and five other books by Ron McMillan (including two well-received Mason & Dixie crime novels set in Bangkok) are available from Amazon as eBooks or paperbacks.