Frustration Stations: Stops on the Way Here
I didn’t begin with the idea of shooting professional models in Bangkok. I’ve lived in Kanchanaburi for the last three years and until recently I had no intention of spending a lot of time in Bangkok. I thought I’d shoot people in Kanchanaburi. That’s what I’ve done for the past year. And although shooting here hasn’t been completely frustrating, much of the time it has. Here’s why:
Kanchanaburi is by far the smallest town I’ve ever lived in. According to the Google AI I just asked, the City of Kanchanaburi has an estimated population of between 27,000 and 63,000 people. The larger district had 168,542 people back in 2024. Compare this to the City of Tampa, where I grew up and lived for a couple of years before moving to Thailand, which has a population of 427,538. The Greater Tampa Bay Area has about 3.5 million people. New York City, where I lived between 2007 and the peak of COVID, has about 8.5 million people living in perfect harmony with each other in within about 300 square miles.
I always felt like Tampa was a small and, often, backwards town. I felt much more at home in New York—and I thrived there. But when Gina and I arrived in Bangkok for the first time, I thought, “Oh, god. I don’t want to spend the next ten years getting good at living here.” So we rented a motorbike and hit the road. When we found a bar we liked in Kanchanaburi, I thought, “Yeah, I could live here.” And so we did.
Kanchanaburi has its charms. It’s a small town and it’s relatively easy to meet people here. And it’s perfect if you’re interested in learning to speak Thai. Had I not started taking photos again, I probably wouldn’t be so frustrated here as I am now. On the other hand, if I hadn’t started taking photos again, I would have become totally bored and left the city a year ago.
The City of Kanchanaburi is a tourist destination for two reasons: the World War II historical sites (it’s the home of the famous Bridge over the River Kwai, which nobody knows how to pronounce properly) and Erawan Falls. If you believe the travel blogs, you will need two or three days to “do Kanchanaburi.” This brings in just enough tourism to keep the string of girl bars along River Kwai Road barely afloat.
My original idea—and this is one I foolishly haven’t let go of—was to photograph the girls who work in the bars. Having seen enough of the way tourists photograph these women and the ways they earn money, I thought it would be cool to photograph them in a boudoir style. I’d invite them to nice hotels in the area and take photos at their comfort level (I wasn’t and still am not interested in creating pornography), and pay them a very reasonable rate. They could also stay in the room for the night, which, having seen some of the rooms they stay in, I thought was a good idea.
The first person who agreed to come never showed. Twice. I had a string of good luck with three models who did show up. The next two people came together and it was a total disaster. I hadn’t really hit on black and white photography as a solution to the skin-color problem in Thailand, and I don’t retouch very much, so I knew the women would hate their photos. The problem with skin color in Thailand is that many Thai people want their skin to appear ghostly white in photos. To have dark skin means that the person is of a low social class, like a farmer. After that, Gina suggested I turn one of the spare rooms in our house into a studio and photograph people there.
My first idea for shooting in the studio was short, short lived. Having lived in Kanchanaburi for a while and speaking a decent amount of Thai, I got to know many of the people in town. I thought it would cool to photograph them in my studio in a raw and immediate style in the vein of Andy Gotts. I figured Thai people love to take photos. This’ll be easy. I was, of course, completely wrong. Thai people, generally speaking, like to take photos of themselves in cafes. These photos are highly posed and run through filters that often make them unrecognizable. They like to wear sunglasses for photos and take look-away shots. They do not see the beauty or interest in Gotts’s images. And they are definitely not interested in sitting for photos in that style.
I loved shooting with flash in the studio from the start. But it was clear that I needed practice. And to practice, I would need people to come take photos. This would become the major project and dominant source of my frustration for the next year. Of course, I took photos. But mostly I tried to find people who would agree to come take photos.
In a surprise twist that I still don’t understand, photographing the bar girls was still out of the question. Apparently, working as a prostitute in a bar and posing for photos for the bar’s social media is no problem. But coming to photograph with me in my studio is a no-go: People would talk. I did manage to shoot a few of the women who work at the bars. All of them loved the experience and loved their photos. Despite this, one of them stopped talking to me completely afterwards because her friends “yack yacked” about her. Another sent me a message a month later asking me to delete the “pornographic” photos we took together. We didn’t take pornographic photos. We took a bunch of photos, some of which showed the suggestion of her nipples through her shirt. When I asked her if I could keep some of her tamer images on my social media she said no. I respected her wishes. Ironically, she’s still using one of my images as her profile picture on her social media. In both cases, I thought I’d found my muse.
I pressed on and shot anyone who would come to the studio. I had a few good runs with models who liked my style and were open to learning and developing their skills. I moved the studio into a space we’d rented near the water authority on River Kwai road—our friend Michael’s tattoo studio and Gina’s gallery are downstairs, my studio is upstairs—I took a lot of photos and bought clothing and lunches for the models and hired friends to do hair and makeup and my photography improved. The model situation did not improve, however. And eventually just about all of the people I shot with regularly ghosted me for reasons that have nothing to do with the photography and everything to do with the provincial mindset of people in Kanchanaburi.
To be clear, Kanchanaburi doesn’t have any models. At least, not as far as I can tell. Or, at least, none of the models here are coming to shoot with me. I think this has to do with the provincial mindset. Here are some example of what I mean based on my experiences:
One prevalent idea is that my images are โป๊, which means indecent, lewd, or obscene. Another way to say it is that they are too sexy. I find this one odd because I have social media and if I want to see sexy images of the women in this town, all I have to do is look at their stories.
Another idea is that I am trying to get the women to take nude photos or that I am trying to have sex with them at the studio. This one is also strange to me because the attire is always up to the model and as a person who has successfully had sex with women, I can tell you that the worst way to get a woman to come over and take her clothes off is to tell her that you’ll be taking some photos while she’s at it.
A third problem is that many people in Kanchanaburi seem to assume that my photography is somehow upsetting or otherwise disrespectful to my wife Gina. This one is totally absurd. Gina likes and fully supports my photography and if anyone here would respect her enough to take her position on this seriously, they would have no doubt about this.
A couple of things happened in a row recently that led me to give up on the idea that I would be satisfied photographing people in Kanchanaburi. One of the women I’d worked with quite a lot—I’d even opened a small beer and wine bar in part to make sure she had a job—ghosted me . . . then I found out that she was trying to sell the Nintendo Switch I’d let her borrow on Facebook. Another super cute young woman with bobbed hair I’d noticed working at one of the bars on the strip gave Gina a look of total disgust when Gina invited her to come take photos at the studio. And then maybe the last straw was when a woman who works at one of the resorts in town asked me to take her photo. When I asked if she had time to talk about the concept, she said that she was too busy to talk while she was at work, so I spent about three hours composing a message that explained what the process was like, creating a mood board based on what she’d told me she wanted the images to be like, and asking her more about her ideas, etc. She didn’t respond, so after a couple of days I sent a followup message. She didn’t respond to that either. After about a week I went back to the resort and asked her why she didn’t respond to me.
“I asked my boyfriend and he said no. He said, ‘How do you know he doesn’t want to get you naked?’”
I said, “Well, has he seen my photography?” Then I thought for a moment and said, “I worked for a long time because you asked me to take your photo and you can’t be bothered to respond to me. That’s completely rude.”
I didn’t need that in my life. Still don’t.
