Krzysztof Filla   Photo Gallery

Photograps 2019/20

Most people associate Thailand with a holiday destination of tropical paradise, turquoise marine lagoons surrounded by coconut palm groves. This image works as a magnet for yearning holidaymakers looking for an ideal beach where they can lounge in a shade of a palm tree, sipping a beverage and posing for another snap, ready to be sent to some social media platform. In the vicinity of exclusive hotels, there are concentrated tourist ghettos, mostly occupied by western tourists where music and alcohol flow until the daybreak. Every year new tourist centres pop up and together with other industries eliminate the remaining natural shrinking habitats for plants and animals. My travel to Thailand had nothing in common with the described above mass tourism. My goal was to get to know the natural world of Indo-Chinese peninsula within my project. To my surprise for 3 months of my traveling in Thailand I was not able to find a place that would match my expectations. National Parks carry out a role of amusement parks that resemble a sort of disnayland with drive roads and assigned places for Sunday picnics and barbecues with an occasional road or trail to a smaller or bigger waterfall. There are travel agencies which organise a few-day trips to the interior of those forest which are closed for independent traveller but those trips vary in price from a few hundreds to a couple of thousands of US dollars.
In search of the places with nature, I was moving in the sphere of Thai culture from places of religious worship to historical monuments, remnants of the past empires. I was observing the daily lives of Thais and blending with the crowds at local markets discovering their friendly and benevolent human nature. It was my first visit in the country that left inside me the urge to return there again, despite difficulties in realization of my goal.