Bangkok - Common Love
2013-15
Every city has an official image and a real one. Bangkok's official image is temples, tuk-tuks, and street food. Its real image is harder to hold: a city simultaneously ancient and disposable, deeply spiritual and aggressively commercial, where the same gesture, hands pressed together, an offering placed carefully, a wish made out loud, applies equally to a Buddha image and a lottery ticket.
Common Love is a study in that equivalence. Over two years, moving through the city at the pace of someone who is neither tourist nor resident, I kept returning to the moments where devotion and desire become indistinguishable. A garland of jasmine on a spirit house. The same jasmine, plastic this time, looped around a car mirror. A monk photographed through the glass of a 7-Eleven. A billboard for skin-whitening cream positioned directly above a golden stupa.
These are not ironic juxtapositions. Bangkok does not experience them as contradictions. The city holds them together without apology, and that capacity, to want transcendence and a new mobile phone with equal sincerity, is what I found most human about it.
The title comes from that ordinariness. Love of the divine, love of comfort, love of beauty, love of luck: in Bangkok these are common. They share the same street, the same vocabulary, often the same object. Common Love is an attempt to photograph that shared language before the eye learns to sort it into categories it was never meant to occupy.
