Chris Coles

Roadside Thailand Chris Coles

ROADSIDE THAILAND deconstructs Thailand's lingering "Orientalism" illusion......presents modern Thailand as it actually is rather than the escapist fantasy "Exotic Orient" version portrayed in so many photo books and tourism marketing campaigns.... For many people around the world, when they think of Thailand, they think of a faraway place that is "Oriental", exotic, alluring, filled with golden temples, unspoiled tropical beaches. Someplace exciting, populated with sensual brown-skinned smiling females. All the escapist images that are constantly being fed into the world's information stream, many of them with the help of TAT, Tourist Authority Thailand, one of the world's most successful tourism marketing entities, are there to help generate the 40 million or so tourists a year who contribute billions of dollars a year to Thailand's GDP. Alas, the actual everyday Thailand is far from exotic, not "Oriental" or alluring and definitely not exciting. Many of the beaches are hardly "unspoiled" and a large number of the females are working in Japanese-owned factories, huge construction sites, in the agricultural sector or cleaning toilets in hotel rooms....neither sensual nor smiling. The Thailand reality, like most everyday realities, is basically mundane. Thailand is a mid-level developing country inhabited by about 65 million relatively low-income people and saturated with un-zoned, un-checked urban/suburban structures sprawling in every direction, especially along Thailand's messy highways. This book presents the everyday reality version of modern Thailand rather than the escapist tourism version that's been so successfully promoted by TAT and the hundreds of escapist fantasy photo books that line the shelves of Kinokuniya and other Thai bookstores.