Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Prostitution Revisted?

I keep wanting to shoot other stories but get called back into the world of prostitution. Over the last few days 2 possible stories have presented themselves.

1) Gay farang sex tourist men with their Thai boyfriends, a portrait series (suggested to me by the Toot Yung gallery). Showing the differences in age, body condition etc.

2) Femaile African sex workers (Ethiopia etc.) who sell themselves cheaply to Arab and Indian men in an area of Bangkok (learned of their existence from a Thai taxi driver). I was thinking of maybe doing a series of close up head shot portraits of these working ladies.

I also saw something at my hotel 2 days ago that got me thinking of doing more prostitution photographs in
the future. The hotel I am staying at it near Patpong in central Bangkok, Patpong is the original gogo bar sex show area of Bangkok. One road in Patpong is entirely devoted to Japanese customers, all the bars are for Japanese customers only (supposedly in the eyes of Japanese men the girls are cleaner because they do not sleep with non Japanese men). In the hotel I am currently staying at their is a preponderance of Japanese males travelling together, I think they come for a holiday and also to go to the Japanese road in Patpong.. In the hotel lobby the other day I saw a 70+year old Japanese man with a very beautiful Thai girl of maybe 19 to 23 years old. She sat quietly and obediently beside him as he talked to his friend and ignored her, I wondered what she was thinking and feeling? It made me want to go into that world again to try to capture those emotions.