A New Deep Black Portrait Style - and Social Difficulties in Shooting Black and White in Thailand
Two more photographs in my new, evolving portrait style yesterday, a dark style that seems to create very beautiful, soulful captures of a person.
Arjan Surat, Dejrat Gym (Bangkok)
Takrowlek Dejrat Gym (Bangkok)
I invite you to click on each photo above, on a big screen, and really look at these wonderful men
This is the story of this new style of portrait, and observations I've made about shooting Muay Thai in black and white over the last few years.
If you'd like to look deeper into the Symbolic Form of the portrait in Siam and Thailand, this is a very good article on the cult of King Chulalongkorn portraits that rose up in the 1980s and 1990s. The Thai attitude toward images as sacred, in the case of Kings & deities, cannot be wholly separated from how photography of the human form itself, and its portrait visage is interpreted. This is not just superstition, relegated beliefs from the past, it is part of an aesthetic form of symbolic