Photographing Thailand, or Trying to Understand It
Working on this Thailand zine has forced me to take photography more seriously. Not in terms of gear or output, but in how I think about what I’m doing. It’s easy to shoot without questioning it. Harder to understand why certain images stay with you and others don’t.
Lately, I’ve found myself coming back to the idea of honesty. Not as a rule, but as a way of working. The same way a simple camera forces you to accept its limitations, this process has done the same to how I see. It’s stripped things back.
Looking at it now, Thailand was never just a place I went to take photos.
Thailand had already been sitting in the background of my life long before I picked up a camera. I first went when I was 11, to Pattaya, to spend time with my grandfather and his family. A few years later, he moved there permanently.
At that age, it felt distant. Exotic in a way I didn’t understand, but something that stayed with me.
When I came back in my mid-20s and early 30s, I saw it differently. The nightlife, the girls, the underbelly. That’s when the idea hit me. I wasn’t just photographing what was in front of me. I was looking into something that had been sitting in my memory for years.
The photos started to feel less like documentation and more like fragments. Pieces of something I hadn’t fully understood at the time.
The zine that came out of it isn’t photojournalism of Thailand’s nightlife. It’s something more personal. Each image feels like a question I’ve been asking for years, still waiting for an answer.
I spent a lot of time just sitting in places that felt right, even if I couldn’t explain it. Not really shooting, just waiting. Sometimes that meant hours in a bar, drinking SangSom, smoking, talking with the staff. You can feel the transaction behind every interaction in those places. It’s always there. But I stayed with it anyway, letting it unfold, waiting for something that felt real enough to photograph.
The photos feel like postcards, but not from a place I discovered. More from a place I thought I already knew. Something shaped early, through fragments and memory. Being there didn’t confirm it so much as complicate it, and the images are what came out of trying to make sense of that.
This work eventually became Good Guys Go To Heaven, a 52-page photography zine exploring street photography and nightlife in Thailand. Shot on Kodak Portra 400 with a half-frame film camera, it brings together images from across Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Koh Samui and Chiang Mai, shaped by the same questions that led me there in the first place.