BKK (Standard Ed.)

Woman, man or snake, whoever you are, tell your story. I collect the words, people, places. End of anxiety in Bangkok, no man's land, play area rest, transit, traffic. By charters everyone floods in: Whites, Red, Yellow, Black, for a night, a week or life. The asshole of the world where a hundred thousand rods sink. Long live Thailand and the new sexual economy! (...) Yan Morvan Yan Morvan proposes with "BKK" a immersion in Bangkok in the 80s where he spent five months. The atmosphere and the substance of this city is restored to us by the photographs and the text written in situ by the photographer. It reveals the atmosphere of the city in this very precise moment. In "BKK" we are witnessing the construction of a look, that of a young photographer immersed in a world that can quickly suffocate and lose you. No miserabilism, no voyeurism, or sensationalism, this book is a unique testimony, under hypnosis, a social and political fresco, a sort of X-ray of Southeast Asia and from the underside of industrial society. City of pleasure where everything is permitted, where Customers from all over the world can satisfy their hunger for a few bahts. limitless fantasies, Yan Morvan takes us into the depths of hard discount sex, where alcohol and other psychotropic substances are part of the decor. It shows bodies damaged by prostitution, alcohol, drugs and Repeated pregnancies, the necessity of this sex trade for survival of a family who remained in the countryside, the moments of rest essential for escape from an almost exclusively nocturnal daily life. Each image is endowed of a force and a softness, the effect produced is quite fascinating: we are sucked into the tumult of lights, the frenzy of clubs where everything is implemented to entice customers and then suddenly we dive into the calm of a room face to face with a prostitute. Yan Morvan describes the the hardness of the mackerels, the turpitude of the customers but also their naivety sometimes, the illusion of prostitutes who hope to find a Western husband. No judgment in the photographer's gaze, but observation with respect and probity. In BKK, he gains the trust of some of them, which gives him allows us to enter into their family intimacy and to glimpse the other side of the decor: who are these girls, where do they come from, why are they prostitutes, where do they live, where and who are their families, is there a life after prostitution? The passage from one place to another (bars, karaoke, saunas, restaurants, apartments...) allows Yan Morvan to dissect a double world face that displays the stigmata of Western colonization and isolation by the society of these communities essential to the economy of the country but incompatible with the image of industrial progress. BKK wants to reflect this that these thousands of women still live today, the beginnings of the commodification of human flesh on an industrial scale, the gaze is neither neither severe nor complacent, simply realistic.