This series of images came about on an assignment for a book
about Thailand called 9 Days in the Kingdom organized by the
publisher Editions Didier Millet. Fifty odd photographers were
sent to different parts of Thailand. I drew Isaan, one of the
poorest parts of Thailand more famous for exporting cheap labour
and people desperate to better their lot in life than anything
else.
The contrast with Bangkok, city of the angels with all its glitter
and chaos, could hardly be more striking. Isaan was dry and
arid. The earth was hard, but surprisingly the people were not.
The city of Khon Kaen, site of one of Thailands biggest university
campuses, highlighted these contrasts.
Throbbing discos in the town’s two lonely “high
rises”, cartloads of fried insects in the nightmarket,
lines of begging monks threading their way silently through
the city, unusually high percentages of foreign men with local
wives, brand new Japanese luxury cars, sprawling garbage recycling
dumps – all this in the middle of vast fields of dusty
crops, skinny cows, unending sugarcane fields, poor farmers
scratching what they could out of the recalcitrant earth.
I then hopped a flight to Angkor, once the biggest city in the
world. It had its fair share of history with its southern neighbour
- hence the name Siam Reap. Here all the glory and bustle of
the past lies in dust and ruins, a reminder of our mortality.
Being there put my whirlwind trip through Thailand into perspective.
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