I was once asked, "Why a train station?" when I began taking a series of portraits at Hua Lamphong Train Station in Bangkok, Thailand—an iconic place I later described as "A train station frozen in time." That phrase perhaps best captures its allure.
At first, my choice was practical. Living within reasonable distance and having easy access via mass transit made it convenient amidst Bangkok's notorious traffic. As the collection of portraits grew, it became a form of meditation, striving to create unique images from the same location repeatedly.
So, the collection continues, displayed in random order.
"It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter."
~Alfred Eisenstaedt
" I like to photograph anyone before they know what their best angles are."
~ Ellen von Unwerth
"It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are."
~ Paul Caponigro
"There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk."
~ Charles Dickens
The camera has no opinion, no emotion, it just renders - and so the emotional components of a photograph live on each side of the camera.
~ Norman Jean Roy
The train is a small world moving through a larger world.
~ Elisha Cooper
Many times the wrong train took me to the right place.
~ Paulo Coeiho
Sometimes you're the train, sometimes you're the track.
~ Luke Beyan
Photographers stop [hotographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
~ Dorothea Lange
It is about to hit the 10-year mark since I started to do more concentrated shoots at the Hualumphong Station. The station is without questionably old, and some may consider it did not age well because of a lack of sophisticated management, or it does not justify effective funding allotment by its diminished role in strategic national traffic planning.
What Hualumphong failed in progress along with time gave the public a chance to witness what a train station and travel used to look and feel like; and the deｍeanor of the typical nothing-mattered and easy-going Thainess, kind of reminding people that yeah, it is "Siam"! And that is the charm.
Although portraits are not the only type of pictures I took in Hualumphong it does stockpile a large portion of them. The light can come in from a large different angles, direct or indirect, giving good photographic practices with a human object of various figures, skin tones, and hair colors.
Repeating the practices often enough started to challenge the photographer's way of approaching to avoid making the same pictures which are not necessarily positive nor negative but a self-teaching practice that one learns to establish a style or a personality that takes time to polish, hopefully, and develop a universal adaptation elsewhere.
It is a study of light, shadow, the structure of the human face and figure, the relationship between objects and the background, colors, and tones, and hopefully a time well spent. Or keep practicing.
Thanks to a great photographer friend, Steve McCurry, who introduced me to the idea of the train station and the consistency of always looking for one whenever we travel together. And don't stop going back to the exact location as when there are lives, something will always happen.
A window serves as a portal to the world beyond, each glance capturing a unique snapshot of life. The window of a train reveals an ever-changing panorama, a moving canvas of diverse landscapes and fleeting moments.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay said, "There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going." This journey invites us to embrace the unknown, witnessing the beauty of change as the world unfolds before our eyes.
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