Sometimes there are days that nothing seems to get done. This time that day lasted a whole week. I’ve started 100 projects and finished none. By Wednesday, I’d had enough and decided to grab my cameras and just go out and chase an idea I have had for about six months.
There’s an old man that lives in downtown Georgetown here in Penang. He is the last of a dying breed, a paper lantern maker. They say there are only two of them left in all of Malaysia: one in the state of Malacca and the other here in Penang. Back in November, I went with my wife to shoot an essay of the man here in Penang. He was sick and so nothing was happening at his shop. All his supplies were all packed away. His old shop looked as if a slight breeze would turn it all to dust at any given moment, as if some Hollywood set designer had come in and strategically placed cobwebs all over to give an old, forgotten feel. Only, this was real: The layers of dust that blanketed the shelves of forgotten cloth were real; the old tattered lanterns that hung from the ceiling and lay decaying on the shelves were real. The only thing missing were the ghosts.
This past Wednesday, I went back to try again to do the essay. When I arrived, the door was bolted shut and there was a sign posted on it saying he had moved. The building was condemned and would soon be torn down. My heart sunk.
As I was leaving, thinking that I might never find him again, he suddenly pulled up in his old car, full of supplies. He smiled at me, walked up to the door, unlocked it and walked in. He told me he was still sick. Apparently it is his heart. I shook my head and then as cautiously as I could, asked him when he thought he might be making lanterns again. He said he didn’t know, but that I was welcome to come back anytime. Apparently, he is not moving quite yet.
I told him I felt it was important that I take pictures of his work and of him creating these lanterns, because he was a national treasure. He smiled a toothless smile and said, no he was too old to be a national treasure. I chuckled and told him that national treasures were usually old. I walked back into his shop and snapped a few pictures. Nothing had changed in 50 years. Why would it?
There was a few ancient bundles of some objects wrapped in old tattered Chinese newspaper. When I asked what they were, he shrugged his shoulders. They had been there for years and he had no idea what was inside. He had not touched them in 5, 10, maybe even 20 years. For me that seemed inconceivable; for him, they were a shrine or a monument to something long gone.
I have to keep returning to his old shop, I have to finish this quest.
I want to make my own monument to The Last Lantern Maker.
I shoot for mostly NGOs and nonprofits. I photograph images of the unknown, the forgotten and the helpless. These are often the stories that most people overlook. 
This work by Matt Brandon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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