SIAM - three years of photo reportage in Thailand

Early 2019, I visited Thailand for the first time. When I came back to Paris, I started to feel the desire to deepen the subject and flight back there, to start a photo reportage about the Thai culture. Late 2019 I moved to Bangkok, in the Lat Phrao district, east of the city. My first reportage, Women of the Market, starts in January 2020, in the North of the country, at the Chiang Mai market where I followed a friend who had come to buy fish, alive, to release them into the river, following the death of his mother, as tradition dictates. The traditional market, where you usually find supplies, groceries, hardware and clothes, seems to me to be the living heart of a culture. The life of the market in Thailand directly brought me back to childhood, when I used to go with my grandmother to the local market in East of France. Women of the Market highlights the life of the traditional market and the women who work there proudly and courageously everyday. The statement to photograph mainly women came naturally out of a desire to bring ever more visibility to those who live in the shadow of male hegemony. I went to meet them after the shooting, and offer them a printed portrait. Warned by my relatives, I knew that this first contact would be awkward. But very quickly, smiles and kindness broke the ice, giving way to a rich cultural exchange, during which they told me about their lives and their working conditions. This series of photo was presented during the Fem Film Festival 2020 at the Bangkok Screening Room. The festival explores both the struggles and achievements of women in professional industries, in politics, in love and in life. When the pandemic hits the country in 2020, the closing of the borders creates serious precariousness, depriving the country of income linked to tourism. Manifestations start on one side and life slows down on the other. I then take the time to observe the culture and I tried to learn Thai language, not without difficulties. Following the first lockdown, I was invited on the shooting of a local film, Sompoï, still in the North, in the Lamphun region. Surrounded by mango orchards and other local fruit trees, I was totally immersed in Thai culture. I learned how to cook essential dishes like Som Tam, a spicy green papaya salad, and other rarer and extremely spicy ones, such as Laab Nua Dib, buffalo tartare with blood and bile, which became one of my favorite meal. I have been several times to the island of Koh Chan, in the south of the country. During the summer of 2021, I even moved there for five weeks to work as a volunteer in an animal shelter. There, I took the Tragedie Paradisio photo series, in the spirit of a film noir that looks like a ghost town. This series shows a daily life in suspension during a pandemic, on an island in the Gulf of Thailand living mainly from tourism. Deserted roads, abandoned shops, a fishing village perched on the water are all vestiges of a bygone era that testify to a sluggish economy and an uncertain future. My trip ended in April 2022, exploring Doi Inthanon National Park, near Chiang Mai where I familiarize myself with landscape and nature photography. Translated in French, English and Thai, this book offers you a few selected moments and a personal interpretation of a stay in Thailand of almost three years, during the pandemic. I only had the chance to see a tiny part of what the country has to offer, but I found peace and serenity there. I wish this journey to anyone who is looking for new cultural horizons. In Asia or anywhere else, as Roland Jaccard writes about the Japanese writer Natsume Sôseki : Any trip that does not destroy us is just a vulgar form of tourism.