Found this today of some old work. I shot the white background sex worker series in 2007-2009-2012. Kind of weird to read the thoughts of others. I left that world and have not returned for the last 13 years.
Sex Worker Series on SLATE.COM
OK, these are some pretty amazing and moving ART photos of a subject most Pattayans are well familiar with either superficially or deeply -- the world famous sex workers of Pattaya, female, male, and ladyboys.
They ALL look so very SAD in these photos. These photos are clearly NOT about titillation! (So if you're looking for that, wrong place.)
While I recognize these photos as genuine photographic art (by GERRY YAUM of Canada), I do wonder what people who actually live in and visit Pattaya actually think about the agenda of the artist.
As follows, he clearly does have an agenda:
Over the years, Yaum said he has struggled with how to photograph his exploited subjects without exploiting them himself. “The conclusion I came to after talking to others and thinking about this for some time was that I needed to understand why I was making the pictures, what my goals were, what was the reason behind it all, what was I trying to express,” Yaum said. “In your inner heart you know why you’re doing something, you know if it’s right or wrong, you know your true motivations. If you’re doing something for the right reasons, for a greater good, then that's the path you want to be on.”
While Yaum hopes that his photographs can serve as an agent of change, he said he fears that the sex industry in places like Pattaya has only grown since he started shooting there. “As long as there is poverty in places like Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines, there will be workers for the sex tourist bars of Southeast Asia. The only hope for the bar worker, as I see it, lies in education,” Yaum said. “Education can lead to other opportunities that might keep the worker from coming to the bars in the first place. No Thai girl or boy dreams of becoming a prostitute. No one dreams of selling their body for a living. Most work the job purely out of economic necessity. Give them other ways to make decent money and maybe things will change.”
Surely, of course, many of these workers are as SAD as they appear in these photos. But this artist ONLY shows sad. Does that represent the reality or not?
******
