Natthaya Thaidecha, known to everyone as Mai, is part of a new generation of Thai photographers whose work is bringing fresh perspectives to the country’s contemporary photography. Although still early in her career, she has already exhibited internationally, and her photographs are marked by a deeply personal approach in which memory, family and belonging become ways of exploring the present.
The longer our conversation went on, the more I realised that Mai rarely answered a question without first questioning it herself.
“I don’t know.”
Talking to her often felt like listening to someone think out loud. She would pause, gather her thoughts, and sometimes answer with another question. When we first met, I wondered whether she was simply being cautious, perhaps even unsure of her work and where it was leading. As we continued talking, though, I realised that wasn’t it. She simply wasn’t interested in settling for an easy answer, or in saying something because it was expected of her.
Mai does not seem particularly interested in fixed conclusions. Despite the recognition her work has already received, she still speaks as someone who is learning: curious, reflective, and willing to admit that she does not yet have all the answers.
Photography entered her life almost unexpectedly. After completing a degree in Cinema and Digital Media, her partner, Spanish photographer Daniel Huete, placed a camera in her hands and introduced her to photographers such as Antoine d’Agata and Chien-Chi Chang. It opened a door to a way of seeing she had not encountered before. Workshops, photobooks and conversations with other photographers followed, each one expanding her understanding of the medium.
Her first photobook, Eclipse, published by the Bad Eyes collective in 2019, already hinted at many of the ideas that continue to shape her work today. Memory, religion and death drift through its pages, suggesting a photographer less interested in documenting the world than in understanding how we experience it.
The following year, after the death of her mother, Mai and her siblings discovered that she had become entangled in significant financial debt involving influential politicians and police officers. What followed was a long period of intimidation, threats and legal battles that left her questioning not only the people around her, but reality itself.
Photography did not offer answers, and she is the first to reject the idea that it could ever be a form of therapy. What it did offer was a way to keep looking and thinking through experiences that refused to make sense.
Those years gradually found their way into May the Matter Rest, the body of work she developed during the 2025 Joop Swart Masterclass. Although rooted in her own experience, the work reaches beyond autobiography. Family becomes the place where larger questions begin to emerge. Love and grief, power and corruption, trust and violence all find their way into the relationships closest to us. The photographs invite us to look beyond one family’s story. They ask what these structures reveal when they appear inside the most intimate relationships.
That movement from the personal towards something more open seems to define the direction her work is taking. Even when people describe her photographs as “too personal”, she responds with another question, asking what we actually mean when we use that expression. Perhaps every photograph begins somewhere personal. The challenge, she suggests, is creating enough space for someone else to recognise part of themselves within it.
Her most recent body of work, As She Calls Her Breath Back, feels like another step in that evolution. If May the Matter Rest confronts the world directly, this newer work turns inward. Set within a quiet, dreamlike landscape suspended somewhere between memory and imagination, it reflects on isolation, belonging and the fragile process of rebuilding a sense of self. It is less concerned with documenting events than with exploring emotions that are often difficult to name.
What stayed with me most after our conversation was the impression of a photographer still becoming, rather than someone who feels she has arrived. Her projects differ, yet they seem connected by the same instinct: to keep asking questions without rushing towards certainty. In a moment when photographers often feel under pressure to define themselves, Mai seems content to keep looking, and to let understanding reveal itself slowly, if it comes at all.
How did photography first enter your life?
It begins, as it does for many people, with a family photo album. In my case, those images came from my grandfather and my father: birthday pictures, vacations, wedding photographs, and scenes from ordinary life. Some were imprecise, some had handwritten notes or drawings on them. These everyday moments, captured by non-professional photographers, exist in almost every household. At the time, I didn’t realise how important and valuable they would become to me.
When I was a child, I also spent time around the police station where my father worked. I remember seeing harsh black-and-white newspaper images and mugshots. At one point, I even drew from that visual language when I was building my portfolio to apply to university. But at the time, I don’t think I really appreciated any of it. Those images and aesthetics were simply part of my environment.
It wasn’t until 2019 that photography re-entered my life in a more conscious way through my partner, Daniel Huete. He introduced me to the work of Antoine d’Agata and Chien-Chi Chang, both of his mentors, and it was the first time I began to understand how expansive photography could be.
He later lent me his camera so I could experiment. Around that time, I joined an intensive photobook workshop with Valentina Abenavoli from Akina Books, where I learned how images can exist and move within the form of a book. Daniel and I eventually made our first self-published photobook, Eclipse: First Quarter, which gave me my first full experience of producing a photobook.
From there, I began to pursue photography more seriously through workshops and educational programmes, including Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops in 2023, photobook-making with Yumi Goto, Kurt Tong, and Moe Suzuki during the Hong Kong International Photo Festival in 2023, the Loose Joints photobook programme through PhMuseum Education in 2024–25, and most recently the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2025. Each of those experiences has reminded me how much there is still to learn, and I still think of myself as someone who is learning.
After your mother’s passing, you describe a moment where reality no longer seemed to make sense. In that period, photography became a way of engaging with what was happening around you. What did it allow you to do or understand?
It was a difficult time, and in many ways I am still trying to live with it. After my mother’s death, photography became a way of giving form to something that otherwise felt impossible to hold. Emotions, memories, and time itself felt fragmented, and photography allowed me to work through that state rather than resolve it.
Photography allowed me to work, to think, and to pull myself, even temporarily, out of the pain. It didn’t make the loss easier to understand, but it gave me a way to stay with it. I wasn’t ready to move on, and I don’t think I was capable of doing that. I don’t like to call my photography a “project”, but thinking of the work in that way, even if it feels distant or institutional, gave me something to hold on to: a reason to keep working and to move toward something with a sense of purpose and direction, even if I didn’t yet know where it would lead.
At the same time, I believe photography also has to offer a sense of possibility. It is not about whether the subject is joyful, but about whether the process of making can sustain you. Discovering a photographic language, building a structure, and creating a narrative are all part of that process. That is what keeps me coming back to it.
My work is still ongoing, but over time it has taken on a life of its own. It continues to grow, while still coming from the same pulse and the same urge to stay alive and sane.
There is an image of your brother, taken shortly after your mother’s death, that feels like a point of no return. Did that image change the way you understood what an image can carry?
Definitely. Before that image of my brother, I thought photographs were mostly representations of things. They showed you what someone looked like, where something happened, or what took place. I did not yet understand that a photograph could contain so many layers beneath the surface. That image of my brother changed that for me.
It is still the one photograph I carry with me, both emotionally and professionally. I can see it without looking at it. It feels as though I never left my mother’s bedroom, never left that house. Every sensation remains present. It is not a matter of being taken back in time; rather, I am living that moment again and again.
That photograph formed my understanding of what an image can hold. It showed me that a photograph can carry more than memory; it can carry an entire experience, with all its emotional and physical weight. That is what I hope for in my own work. I want images to become places people inhabit rather than just observe. I want viewers to feel the lives contained within them, and for those images to remain with them long after they have looked away.
Family seems to sit at the core of everything: grief, belief, even the way power and corruption are experienced. Does it remain the lens through which you understand the world?
It does. My photography comes from what is both close to me and distant from me, and family sits at the centre of that. It is where many of our earliest experiences take place, and it informs how we understand love, grief, belief, power, trust, and conflict. Even when we think we have moved beyond it, those early experiences continue to influence how we respond to the world and to the people around us.
I think that is why my work often moves between two spaces. In May the Matter Rest, I find myself looking directly at how power, corruption, and violence affect everyday family life. In As She Calls Her Breath Back, I find myself making space for grief, longing, and belief — not to escape reality, but to live alongside it. Both come from the same place. They are just different ways of trying to understand those experiences.
Both bodies of work have asked more of me than I expected. There were moments when I questioned whether I should continue. But then I realised I could pause, but I couldn’t let the work go. Not yet.
I am aware that our interests and concerns shift over time, and perhaps one day my focus will move elsewhere. But for now, I find myself returning to the impact family can have on a person: how it can transform, challenge, wound, or sustain us.
I am drawn to these subjects because they feel both familiar and impossible to fully understand. It feels like looking into a void that is too deep to comprehend, and it is that tension that keeps me returning to the work.
At times, making photographs can feel like trying to bring some order to something that resists it. Has working with images helped you make sense of things, or has it made their complexity more visible?
For me, this becomes a question of how images are arranged, shown, and read. These days, I find myself questioning what makes sense anymore.
When I was working on the photobook dummy for May the Matter Rest, I spent a lot of time trying to organise the story. I focused on structure, pacing, and narrative flow. The nuance and overlap between the actual timeline of events and how they are experienced is difficult to translate into a static format like a photobook. It can work as a narrative flow, but emotionally, storytelling functions in a different way. I cannot provide a fully chronological account of the events. Instead, I think of the work as an entry point, closer to a cinematic experience. There is an opening that sets the tone, and then a progression in which the viewer tries to follow the story, anticipating what comes next. But what emerges is not fixed or fully visible at once. It unfolds through partial understanding, where what is seen and what is withheld are always in tension. I am interested in that uncertainty, in not fully knowing where it leads, and in how meaning shifts as you move through it.
The question then becomes how to organise something like that. Maybe not in a complete way, but in a way that still allows it to hold together. That does not mean there is no structure to work with, but that the structure itself begins to carry meaning as part of the storytelling. I found that process fascinating. I think complexity has its own structure, and part of the work is learning to see it not only as a source of frustration, but also as something that can generate curiosity and creativity.
That experience showed me that life is rarely linear and that our emotional realities are often contradictory. While working with photography and making photobooks is, in some sense, an attempt to give form to experience, I think the challenge is to create enough structure for someone to enter the work without losing the complexity that makes it honest.
Working with images has not necessarily helped me make sense of things. It has made their complexity more visible.
Your work is sometimes described as “too personal.” It is an interesting definition, and not an easy one. It says more about the viewer than the image, perhaps. How do you respond to that? Is distance necessary in photography, or can closeness be a form of strength?
When someone describes my work as “too personal,” I want to ask: what do you mean when you say something is “too personal”? That comment often comes from how the work is read through themes of family, grief, and loss. Our experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and ways of seeing are formed through the lives we have lived, who and what we care for, and the social contexts we exist within. In that sense, I believe photography always comes from somewhere personal.
That said, I do take the comment seriously. It makes me question where the work begins and where it will go, and whether I am creating enough space for others to enter it. To be honest, I have found this kind of comment frustrating and limiting because it can reduce the work to a private story rather than allowing it to be read within a larger social structure.
What interests me is not family or personal narrative as an isolated subject. Family is one of the ways we encounter larger structures of care, grief, belief, power, responsibility, and conflict. When people see a photograph of my family, I hope they are not only seeing my family. I hope they can also recognise something of their own experiences, relationships, or how those systems operate within their own lives.
For me, closeness is not a limitation. It is a way of working that requires intention and care. How much to reveal, how much to hold back, how much we take, and how much we give. It challenges me to move closer while still acknowledging the distance that always exists between me and another person, no matter how intimate the relationship may be.
Of course, the work may begin with something deeply personal, but I believe its meaning does not sit in the image alone. It exists in the space between the image and the viewer, and in how they choose to engage with it.
Home doesn’t seem fixed. Its definition shifts, or perhaps never fully settles. Bangkok is a place you inhabit, but not entirely a place you belong to. How does that instability influence your work?
I’m not sure I believe home is something fixed anymore. The older I get, the more my understanding of home keeps shifting. Sometimes it is a place, sometimes it is a person, sometimes both, and sometimes it is simply the feeling that I am safe enough to be myself.
I remember participating in the Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops in Cambodia in 2023. The mentors and participants welcomed me with an openness and friendship that I never expected to find in such a short time. We have stayed connected ever since, and I try to see them every year, whether in Cambodia or somewhere else. In many ways, seeing them feels like coming home.
On the other hand, building that same sense of belonging in Bangkok, where I am based, has taken much longer. I am still trying to build those kinds of connections. I am comfortable in Bangkok, but a deeper sense of belonging takes time. Sometimes a big city can make it easy for people to remain within their own circles. That experience has encouraged me to create communities through my collective, Bad Eyes, which brings together photographers and artists from different backgrounds and countries.
For me, belonging has become something that exists between people rather than within geography. Perhaps that is how this instability enters my work. I no longer think belonging is something a place gives me. Instead, I think it grows through the relationships, memories, and experiences I create there. This sense of instability is something I recognise in my own experience, and I am also aware that it resonates for others in very different ways.
The local Thai photography scene can feel closed, even difficult to enter. Has that sense of distance shaped the way you position yourself and your work?
The photography community in Bangkok is quite close-knit, and like many communities, it has its own hierarchies. For a while, I felt as though I was observing it from the outside rather than being part of it. Over time, I stopped seeing that as a disadvantage. Instead, I focused on building my own community with people whose values and ways of working resonate with mine. That is why Bad Eyes, our independent collective and photobook publishing house, and Trace, our contemporary art space, exist. They grew from a desire to create spaces for conversation, collaboration, and experimentation — not as alternatives to a community, but as places where different practices can meet without fixed boundaries.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with communities being selective. Not every space has to be for everyone, and I don’t think I need to belong to every circle I encounter. Trying too hard to be accepted can become exhausting, and at some point I found I would rather spend that energy making work and building meaningful relationships.
I have learned that meaningful conversations do not depend on being inside a particular circle. They happen through the work itself, through exhibitions, photobooks, workshops, and the people you meet along the way. That perspective has also shaped how I think about Bad Eyes and Trace. Rather than creating another circle, I hope they create spaces where different people can meet through photography and everything that grows from it. That has become far more important to me than belonging to any one community.
Perhaps that distance has shaped me more than I first understood. It taught me not to measure my practice by whether I belong to a particular circle, but by the conversations the work creates. I believe community is something you build over time through trust, generosity, shared curiosity, and the willingness to disagree.
Looking back, who or what has left a lasting mark on the way you see? Not just in photography, but more broadly?
The first person that comes to mind is my mother. Even though she is no longer here, her presence still lives and breathes within me.
When I was younger, I don’t think I understood her as a full person. In fact, I still feel I don’t fully know her. That absence has stayed with me. Perhaps I was too young to see her beyond her role as my mother. Only after her passing did I realise I wanted to know her beyond my place in her life, and that feels sad to admit.
There is something I still carry from her that I don’t know how to explain: the sense of not having access to her completely, of only ever knowing fragments of her. That has left a hole in me more than I thought.
I remember something she once said about one of the relationships she had: “It’s not about love.” At the time, I didn’t understand it at all. I was too young, and I dismissed it without thinking much about it. But over time, what she said that night kept returning to me. It unsettled me.
But there was also endurance. Not in a heroic sense, but in the way she continued even when nothing became easier. That stays with me too.
I carry all of this into how I live and how I make work. Photography, for me, requires a kind of persistence, not towards clarity, but towards living with and learning from things I don’t yet understand. I don’t think photographs resolve anything, but they allow me to keep asking questions, and sometimes to see something I couldn’t see before.
Silvia Donà