Narrative
Asia
8
5

I often get asked why I don’t photograph in black and white, as though it’s a more prestigious or respected form, colour by inference more common or prosaic. In this digital age, with no processing costs or limits on treatment, black and white often seems restrictive, a denial of the ocular carnival of life; at worst an artifice, a way to give average images an air. Thailand is a geographic manifestation of that dichotomy. Turn up your nose at this visual feast to your own impoverishment.

I often get asked why I don’t photograph in black and white, as though it’s a more prestigious or respected form, colour by inference more common or prosaic. In this digital age, with no processing costs or limits on treatment, black and white often seems restrictive, a denial of the ocular carnival of life; at worst an artifice, a way to give average images an air. Thailand is a geographic manifestation of that dichotomy. Turn up your nose at this visual feast to your own impoverishment.

Thailand

There is no end to the opulence of its palette; no way not to want to soak my camera in its technicolour foams and streams; no part of me that wants to pretend not to adore the endless train of etherial souvenirs it produces.
Shining patterns of lacquered boxes, wooden statues, and porcelain figurines. Smoky concoctions in countless temples. Painted rainbows of parasols and silks. The lush marines of its jungles and forests, spotted with oily pigments of tropical orchids and blooms. It sometimes seems like Thailand was the place that colour was first invented.
 
 
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ANTHONY ELLIS