Piyavit Thongsa-Ard, also known as Tan, is a Thai documentary photographer born and raised in Bangkok. Photography entered his life through a desire to travel, rather than a plan to make it his profession. His father was a policeman, and the decision to build a life around travelling took him away from some of the expectations his family had for him.
During the 1990s, Tan travelled through the border regions between Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, where he encountered ethnic communities living with conflict and displacement. On one journey to Kanchanaburi, he witnessed Mon refugees crossing into Thailand after fleeing attacks by the Myanmar military. He had a camera with him and began to photograph what he saw. The images were later published, opening a path into photojournalism that he had never consciously set out to follow.
Since then, his work has taken him repeatedly back to the border regions of Southeast Asia and, more recently, along the Mekong. His knowledge of these places comes from returning to them, spending time there and listening to the people whose lives are connected to them.
His recent work examines the changes affecting the river and the communities along its banks. During our conversation, I was particularly interested in the difficulty he described in making those changes visible. They happen gradually, often without a single moment capable of representing or explaining them.
Tan frequently began his answers with a personal memory before moving into the history and politics around it. He spoke carefully, without rushing towards a conclusion. His many years of travelling through Southeast Asia and returning to the same regions could be felt in his reluctance to offer simple explanations. He knows that witnessing something is not the same as understanding it, and that a photographer can misread a place by arriving too quickly or failing to learn enough about it.
We spoke about what a single photograph can communicate, what remains beyond the frame and why the circumstances in which an image is made matter. Tan does not expect photography to provide definitive answers. He is more interested in the questions it can raise and the connections it can reveal: the ways in which political and economic decisions made elsewhere enter the daily lives of a fisherman, a family or a small community along the river.
When you first began travelling, photography was not yet a profession. What changed once you started carrying a camera?
I did not begin with a clear plan to become a photographer. At first, I travelled simply because I was curious and wanted to see and understand more of the world around me.
In the 1990s, I began travelling through the border areas between Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. These were places marked by migration, armed conflict, displacement and political change. Gradually, travelling became about more than discovering new places. I started carrying a camera, and it gave me a way to approach people, learn from the situations around me and ask why these things were happening.
Photography developed naturally from there. In time, it became my profession and the means through which I could continue asking those questions.
Your early experience along the Thai–Myanmar border seems to have changed the way you understood photography. What did that first encounter with conflict and displacement teach you?
I was born and raised in Bangkok, and until then most of what I knew about conflict and displaced communities had come from television news. When I went to the border, met people and saw the conditions in which they were living, I realised that the situation was far more complex than the images I had previously seen.
It taught me that photographing conflict could not be confined to dramatic or violent moments. Without an understanding of the history, the political context and the lives of the people involved, my photographs risked becoming little more than action images. They might show that something had happened, but not why it had happened or what followed.
I realised that I needed to study before photographing. I had to ask where people came from, what they had lived through, which circumstances had shaped their lives and how they understood their own situation.
Photography cannot explain everything, but it can take us beyond the immediate event and help us understand more about the people involved, the history and the complexity of what we see.
You have spoken about the importance of staying long enough to understand a story. What does spending more time in a place allow you to see that a shorter visit cannot?
Most of the stories that interest me require time because they concern people’s lives, conflict, migration and social or environmental changes whose causes are not always immediately visible.
News and agency photographers often work under strict deadlines and have to report what is happening at a particular moment. I have worked that way many times myself. Working independently, however, has sometimes allowed me to remain after the immediate event has passed or to return to the same place repeatedly.
When you spend more time somewhere, your understanding begins to change. People gradually become more comfortable and open. You learn about their personal histories, and you discover that the same event may be remembered and explained very differently depending on a person’s experience, interests and position within the community.
Those differences matter. They make me slow down and consider what is really happening, where it comes from, who is affected and what cannot be explained through a single image or point of view.
Time allows me to notice relationships, contradictions, silence, fear and resilience. It also helps me understand more about the reasons behind people’s decisions. Staying longer is not about producing a greater number of photographs. It gives me a fuller understanding of the story and allows me to represent it with greater care and responsibility.
Is this kind of long-term engagement still possible in today’s media environment?
I believe it is still possible, although it has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The problem is not entirely new, but the pressures have become more visible and intense in the digital media environment.
Long-term work requires time and money, and it carries responsibilities. A photographer may need to return to the same place many times, build relationships, verify information and understand the context before deciding how to represent it. Much of the financial and personal cost of that process falls on the photographer.
Media organisations also have limited budgets, deadlines and space. A story that takes months or years to develop may eventually be published in only a few pages or presented very briefly online.
Independent photographers live with a constant tension between remaining committed to a story and earning enough money to continue working. Digital platforms have created new publishing opportunities, while also encouraging people to consume images more quickly and increasing the demand for stories that are immediate, concise and easy to understand.
Long-term work remains necessary, particularly when dealing with complex subjects, but traditional media can no longer be its only source of support. Photographers also have to seek grants, collaborations, independent platforms and other forms of funding that allow them to continue working responsibly.
You have said that you find Thailand difficult to photograph because you feel you have already “taken a side”. What do you mean by that?
When I say that I have already “taken a side”, I am not suggesting that I want to become a spokesperson for a political group. I was born and raised in Thailand and photographed events there for many years at the beginning of my career. I cannot approach the country as though I were encountering it for the first time.
Initially, I covered events in Thailand as a news photographer. As the years passed, I became more interested in why those events were happening, who was affected and which political or economic structures lay behind them.
Thailand has repeatedly experienced military coups, political violence, inequality, corruption, natural disasters and other social crises. Many of these are recurring patterns rather than isolated events. Once you begin to recognise those patterns and their consequences, it becomes difficult, and perhaps dishonest, to behave as though you know nothing or feel nothing about what is happening.
For me, “taking a side” means recognising my responsibility towards the people who experience the consequences of power. It does not permit me to abandon factual accuracy or ignore information that conflicts with my position. My closeness to the subject makes it even more important to examine my assumptions, verify what I am told and resist reducing a complex situation to something I already believe.
This is one of the reasons I find photographing Thailand so difficult. The country is very close to me, personally and politically. International coverage, meanwhile, often returns to the same familiar subjects: coups, protests, prostitution, corruption, poverty or exoticism. Thailand is far more complex than that.
Responsibility does not require a photographer to pretend to have no position. It requires honesty about where you stand, an openness to information that challenges your understanding and a serious attempt to represent people and events as fairly and accurately as possible.
In 2005, a flood destroyed your archive of black-and-white negatives. What did that loss mean to you, and did it change the way you thought about photographs?
It did not immediately change my belief in what photography could do. I still saw it as a way of understanding people, events and the circumstances behind them. What changed was my understanding of the photograph as a physical object, and of the archive as something far more fragile than I had realised.
The flood happened in Chiang Mai in 2005. My house was in the Kamphaeng Din area, and all my black-and-white negatives were stored on the ground floor. When the house flooded, I lost an archive produced over a period of between fifteen and eighteen years.
It was more than a professional loss. The archive contained a record of places and situations I had witnessed, but it also documented my development as a photographer. Losing it felt like losing part of my personal history.
I sometimes think that, had those negatives survived, I might have continued working mainly in black and white for much longer. The loss came at a time when photography was entering the digital era and the professional market was changing.
At first, I did not cope well. I stopped photographing for a while because I had no clear idea how to rebuild the work or where to begin again. Later, an older photographer whom I respected encouraged me to look at the situation differently. He helped me understand that although the physical archive was gone, the experience, knowledge and reasons behind the work had not disappeared.
When I returned to photography, I had to adapt. I began working digitally and using colour more often, not because I had rejected black and white, but because the technology and professional environment had changed.
The experience taught me that photographs do not preserve themselves. An archive requires protection, organisation, duplication and continuing care. The physical image matters, but a photographer’s experience and way of seeing cannot be held entirely within an archive.
You stepped away from photography at different moments in your life. What continued to bring you back, and did your relationship with it change each time?
The most significant break came after the 2005 flood, when the loss of so much of my archive seriously affected my confidence in continuing. At other times, I stepped back because of the practical uncertainty involved in sustaining a life and career in photography.
What eventually brought me back was the realisation that photography remained the most effective way I knew to investigate people’s lives, social issues and the forces affecting them. It was the profession I understood, but more importantly, it was still the way I could engage most meaningfully with the subjects that concerned me.
My relationship with photography changed over time. In the beginning, it was closely connected to travel, curiosity and the desire to discover the world. Later, research, context and responsibility became more important, along with the consequences of representing other people’s lives.
Returning after the flood also meant accepting that archives are fragile, technologies change and photographers have to keep learning and adapting. I became less concerned with the photograph as an object in itself and more attentive to the process: how I work, what I understand, what I may have misunderstood and whether the final story represents the people involved with enough accuracy and respect.
Your recent work along the Mekong focuses on slower changes rather than the more immediate forms of conflict you photographed earlier. What led you in this direction?
I do not see my recent work as a complete departure from conflict. The form of conflict I am trying to understand has changed.
Earlier in my career, I was drawn to situations that were more visible and immediate: borders, refugees, political violence and displacement. Their effects on people could often be seen directly.
Working along the Mekong has made me more aware of another form of conflict, one that develops slowly and can be difficult to photograph. It may have no single dramatic event. Instead, it enters people’s lives through changing water levels, disrupted fish migration, unpredictable seasons, unstable prices, declining incomes and development projects over which local communities have very little influence.
Fishermen may not describe what they are experiencing in terms such as climate change, hydropower development or regional political economy, but they encounter the effects of these forces every day. They see them in water levels that no longer follow familiar patterns, in fishing equipment that no longer works as it once did and in traditional knowledge that can no longer fully explain the river’s behaviour.
The Mekong may appear to be an environmental story, but it also concerns power, development, economics, memory and the survival of communities that have depended on the river for generations.
This kind of story requires a different way of working. It cannot be understood during a short visit or attributed to a single cause. I need to return, listen to different accounts, compare people’s observations with other evidence and notice small changes in daily life.
For me, working on the Mekong is an attempt to understand a slower and less visible form of conflict, one whose effects accumulate over time and alter entire communities.
When you photograph the Mekong today, do you see it more as a place or as a system shaped by political and economic forces?
I see it as both. I do not think they can be separated.
For people living along the Mekong, the river is far more than a geographical feature. It carries memory, landscape, villages, seasonal rhythms and ways of life that have developed over generations. It is home, food, income, knowledge and family history.
The more time I spend there, the more clearly I see that nature is not the only force shaping the river. Water levels, fish migration and local livelihoods are increasingly influenced by dams, water management, national borders, development policies, markets, middlemen and decisions made far from the communities that live with their consequences.
At the same time, I have to be careful. Not every change can be explained by one dam, one policy or one country. The Mekong is a highly complex system in which climate, infrastructure, markets, local practices and seasonal variation interact. I do not want a photograph to imply a conclusion that the available evidence cannot support.
I am interested in the beauty of the river and in everyday life along its banks, as well as the connections between people, place and power. I want to understand how political and economic decisions made elsewhere become visible in the life of a fisherman, a family or a small riverside community.
You have worked alongside Western photographers and with international editors. Do Western and Southeast Asian photojournalists approach stories differently, or are those differences also shaped by the global media industry?
There can be differences in approach, but I would hesitate to explain them simply as differences between “Western” and “Southeast Asian” photographers. Language, education, access to editors, professional networks, funding and the structure of the global media industry all play a part.
Language is one of the clearest factors. For many photographers in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, limited English can make it difficult to communicate with international editors, write proposals, explain the context of a story or participate fully in editorial discussions, even when they possess a much deeper understanding of the place and subject.
Photographs are important, but in documentary and editorial work they rarely travel alone. They need accurate captions, research, proposals and conversations with editors. A photographer must also be able to explain why a local story matters beyond the place where it is happening.
A photographer whom I respect once told me that the more you read about your subject, the better you will photograph it. I strongly believe that. Documentary photography involves more than seeing and pressing the shutter. It also requires reading, listening, studying history, verifying information and understanding how a local situation connects to the wider world.
Editors and international media influence which stories become visible. Coverage of Thailand and Southeast Asia is often drawn towards familiar subjects such as coups, protests, prostitution, corruption, poverty or exoticism because they are easily recognised and marketed to international audiences. The societies of this region are far more complex than those subjects suggest.
Local photographers may possess detailed knowledge and long-term access, but without language skills, funding, professional networks or editors willing to engage with that complexity, their work may never reach an international audience. Being local does not automatically guarantee a deeper or more responsible story either. Local photographers also need to question their assumptions and continue developing their research and professional practice.
Differences do exist, but unequal opportunities within the global media system shape them as much as culture or nationality. International media need to make more space for perspectives from within the region, while photographers here need the opportunity to communicate their knowledge without reducing it to familiar stereotypes.
After everything you have seen and experienced, is there a question you are still trying to understand through photography?
Yes. I think it has always been there. Throughout my work, I have been more interested in people’s lives than in photography itself, and in the environments and systems that shape those lives. It may be a border, a river, a village, a city, politics, the economy or changes in the natural world. None of these things exists separately from human life.
For me, photography is a window. It allows people from one world to look into another and perhaps understand each other a little better. I do not see photography as a final answer. A photograph cannot explain everything, but it can make us stop, ask questions and recognise that another person’s life is more complex than it may first appear.
The question I am still trying to understand may sound simple, although it has no simple answer: how do people continue to live, adapt and preserve their dignity while facing pressures and forces they cannot fully control?
Perhaps this is what I have been following throughout my career: the relationship between people, place and time, and the forces that continue to change their lives.
Silvia Donà