Thailand has arguably the best street food culture in the world. Food is omnipresent, stalls on wheels are parked on almost every street, at intersections, and deep inside Bangkok’s alleys. The food always looks appetizing, tastes great, and is still very, very affordable, especially for Europeans and Americans. A “trend” I’ve noticed during our visit […]
Of the three projects presented here, with some luck, I’ve been able to capture new images for two of them while walking along the streets and alleyways in Sieng Gong. Yesterday’s visit with buddy Erik was one of those rare days where I located a couple of new artifacts for the Resurfaced project and captured […]
I’ve walked by this bus stop on Silom Road several times during the four weeks that we’ve been in Bangkok. There’s always a small crowd of passengers and as I pass it, I wonder how far a distance each must travel before they are home or at work. For about three years, from 2003-2005, I […]
Wednesday night. We serendipitously met these two guys late yesterday afternoon. Charlotte and I were on our way to the usual eatery further down Silom Road and we’d taken a new route to get there. The sun had finally dipped behind the towering skyscraper ‘King Power Mahanakhon’, bringing the heat down to a more manageable […]
Captured this flower pot the other day and was blown away by a. how close my phone allowed me to get to the flowers (using the wide-angle/macro lens) and b. how incredibly accurate the colors were to what I saw with my naked eyes.
– Mr. Joakim, please pull down your pants and underwear and lay back on the table. I want to feel your testicles. That’s how weird my afternoon began yesterday, Saturday. But this story’s genesis actually began the day before, late Friday afternoon. It was while I was in the shower, after a sweaty workout at […]
Here in Bangkok, Charlotte and I will be enjoying a vegetarian, totally turkey-less Thanksgiving dinner tonight. We’ve decided to eat at our usual street food restaurant on Silom Road where food is always ambrosial and service is brisk. I read that of all the world’s food cultures, Thai cuisine is considered one of the five […]
I just went through about two dozen images stored on the Fuji x100v. I typically don’t download and sift through photographs from that camera on a daily basis. In fact, I hadn’t seen any of the images since we arrived here three weeks ago. On the other hand, I am fussy about reviewing all the stuff […]
A friend loves to tease me about my passion for Mexican and Japanese cuisine, and how I seem to circumvent local cuisine in my tireless pursuit of bean burritos, fish tacos, spicy tuna rolls, and teppanyaki fried salmon. He’s not entirely wrong, especially in countries where the food scene consists mostly of boring or fatty, […]
I am currently editing a short film from my many visits to Sieng Gong/Talat Noi. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I had so much useable footage. This is great since it’s less appealing to film there today when everyone is more or less masked. Once finished, the film will be added to the […]
Not sure if it qualifies as an ASMR calming film, but apparently, this batch of vegetation floating so rhythmically near a pier in the Chao Phraya River, grabbed my attention as something I found oddly satisfying to watch.
Last night, I captured this long exposure scene using the iPhone’s “Night Mode” while sitting on the hotel’s rickety jetty, sharing a can of local beer with Charlotte as we watched riverboats float by. Up here in Ayutthaya, the Chao Phraya River is about 1/5th of the width it has in Bangkok. Which makes it […]
Shocking as it may be, for whatever reason, neither Charlotte or I had ever been to Old Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand. So, in order to remedy this, we took a northbound train this morning and arrived in Ayutthaya about midday, after two hours. The ride itself was smooth, but the two blabbering old German dudes […]
So I’ve been working on three vastly different art projects for several years, giving a lot of love to each, but not all at once. At first glance, the first project about Sieng Gong, the subdistrict in Bangkok’s Talad Noi area, is slanted more toward classic documentation. But when given a proper look, there is […]
This film was shot from our bedroom window. I think it gives a wonderful peak into Bangkok’s widely diverse architectural scene. I’ve spent about an hour assembling various shorter clips into this longer timelapse. Time well spent, I think, and commercially valueless. This morning at the gym, my 9th consecutive workout in as many days, […]
It’s always been the “street people” that have intrigued me the most. Regardless really of where in the world I’ve had the privilege to encounter and interact with them, if ever so briefly. Why do I feel a stronger affinity to everyday people than to those well-to-do? Not sure. Perhaps it’s how they don’t try […]
By mere happenstance, I spotted this tall wall of jars, all filled with some kind of color, at a department store earlier today. We were heading to the famously intense Chatuchak Market (aka Weekend Market) to see if things there had changed much since our last visit some 3 years ago. The simple answer? Not really. Sure, it’s a market, so obviously some of what’s […]
After a short hiatus, primarily due to jet lag-induced creative paralysis and a quick wrestling match with the existential demons that I once again amazingly conquered, the search for Resurfaced artifacts can continue unobtrusively. Here’s one interesting composition captured the other day on a wall, in an alley not far from the Christian graveyard that […]
This is the Original Resurfaced Vehicle in Bangkok. This old wrecked and abandoned car which I saw for the first time more than 10 years ago in the capital’s Talad Noi neighborhood. The car (Fiat?) is one of the very reasons why I initially started looking at what happens when a surface becomes so dilapidated […]
Just back from our local 7/11 where a friendly barista (only on duty in the AM) can conjure up a perfect Americano. On the way home from getting my morning java, I bought a small bag of fresh, sliced pineapple. I’m pretty sure the price has doubled from 10 to 20 baht since 2019, but […]
I saw this hand yesterday while walking around Talad Noi, one of my favorite Bangkok neighborhoods and a place I’ve documented for over a decade. The outstretched hand reminded me of how hard it can be to accept change. Even if it means abandoning the very hand that feeds you, change aka evolution aka iteration, […]
In Southeast Asia, this green delight is known as water spinach, river spinach, water morning glory, water convolvulus, or by the more ambiguous names “Chinese spinach”, “Swamp cabbage” and “Kangkong”. I kinda like the swamp cabbage moniker. In Thailand, it’s called “Pak Boong” (ผัดผักบุ้งไฟแดง่) and I order a plate of it just about every time we eat Thai cuisine. The above image […]
Today is our daughter Elle’s twenty-second birthday. We had a wonderful, pre-birthday Italian-themed dinner about a week ago in Malmö, so today, Charlotte and I will celebrate Elle via a video call this afternoon, Bangkok time (Sweden is six hours behind us). Today is our daughter Elle’s twenty-second birthday. We had a wonderful, pre-birthday Italian-themed […]
Chaos has been an essential, no, fundamental part of my existence for as long as I can remember. As much as I appreciate the benefits of structure and organization in my life, it is within the infinitely elastic boundaries of the unpredictable that I feel the most energized and creatively inspired. Perhaps this makes more […]
I’d barely recovered from the flight to Copenhagen from L.A. and I’m now once again jet lagged beyond belief. As topsy-turvy as the next few days of existence here in Bangkok will inevitably be, it’s totally worth it. Existing in this wonderfully balmy weather, in a sea of spontaneous smiles and with an abundance of affordable […]
A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with centenarian Fred Nicholas. Fred and my father Ernest Raboff were college friends at USC before WWII and while my father was sent to France to cover the war as a reporter for Stars & Stripes, Fred was first stationed in southern Europe, then northern Africa and finally […]
I’ve never been much of a small fish enthusiast. But these little fishies caught my attention during an ungodly early visit to the New Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx, New York City. I remember what it was like walking through the old Fulton Fish Market on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Chaotic. That whole area […]
Halloween is slowly but surely being adopted by Swedes. Particularly families seem to embrace this holiday wholeheartedly. I have vivid memories of being dressed up as Batman and Spiderman as a child and as a twenty-something during a year living in Los Angeles, I went to a party in the Hollywood Hills dressed as a […]
I increasingly find what’s pleasing to my eye/ear/taste/touch to be deceiving. Unchallenging, for sure. I have an ongoing struggle to figure out how and when to bypass the instinctive, reptilian urge to look beyond what immediately seems nice (safe) and focus on what might provide long-lasting satisfaction. If I had a shrink, I wonder what […]
I captured just how ephemeral clouds are through our living room window. I thought of posting this late last night after watching an incredibly interesting and mind-bending Netflix documentary called “A Trip to Eternity“. I don’t know what the efx artist/art director was taking when they came up with the concepts for the film’s visual […]
While Charlotte and Elle enjoy great weather as they hike the hills of Soller on the Balearic island of Majorca, much of my day here in Malmö is spent hunkered down in the image archives. I’m on a mission to locate those rare photographs, the truly unique moments, that I’ve captured in and around our […]
As somebody that knows a thing or two about making short films using affordable but nonetheless effective cameras and lenses, I’ve been yearning to try out “Cinematic Mode” on Apple’s latest smartphone, iPhone 14 Pro Max. Cinematic Mode has been around since it was launched on the iPhone 13 about a year ago. The feature […]
Sundays can be either extremely unproductive or unbelievably effective. Today was a bit of both. Woke up late and decided to stay in bed and watch a documentary about Marilyn Monroe (before watching the biopic “Blonde”. In a typical, Lutheran fashion, I did feel a little guilty about my choice, but since Charlotte had flown […]
Captured this surface on a wall along Hollywood Boulevard just a little over a week ago. The world-famous street is the same derelict cesspool as it’s always been. Which served my purpose for visiting again quite nicely as I discovered several new pieces for the resurfaced series before heading south and then west on Sunset […]
From last week’s road trip through the Mojave Desert, and Sierra Mountains with my brother Nick and then along the Pacific Coast Highway when we were joined by his wife Heather and their dog Tikka. I’d not been to California or seen either of them since 2019, so it felt good all around to be […]