There are places you visit, and then there are places that quietly mess with your eyes. Bangkok was the latter. My first trip in 2024 changed the way I understood colour, the way I looked at a street, the things I considered worth photographing.
Until then, I had my own habits, my own ways of looking, my own idea of what made a photograph work. Then came the colours, so unapologetically loud they seemed to have no interest in whether they went together, the streets that refused to sit still, the food stalls, tangled wires, passing motorbikes, plastic stools, fluorescent signs, little shops, people going about their lives as if the extraordinary wasn't happening all around them.
Everything seemed to coexist without asking permission from anything else. There was no careful arrangement, no attempt to make things look pretty for the camera, and perhaps that was exactly what got me. Beauty wasn't waiting for the right light or the right composition. It was happening in the middle of the mess — at an intersection, beside a steaming pot, in the face of someone waiting for a bus, in a colour combination I would probably have never thought to put together myself.
Bangkok made me less interested in controlling what I saw and more interested in keeping up with it.
I started looking differently. Paying attention to things I might have walked past before, trusting a frame because it felt right rather than because I could explain why, letting colour do the talking, allowing the street to be a little excessive. It was a palette changer in every sense of the word, but also something of a reset. A reminder that the camera can become predictable when your eyes do, that sometimes you need to be somewhere unfamiliar to realise how much of your seeing has become habit.
I came back with photographs, obviously, but also with a slightly different appetite for the street. More curious, less restrained, more willing to let a photograph be loud, strange, crowded or completely unlike what I thought I was looking for. It was my first time in Bangkok, but it felt like being introduced to a version of photography I hadn't quite allowed myself to make yet.
Some cities give you pictures to remember them by. This one changed what I went looking for when I picked up the camera.
Bangkok · 2024
