Nothing Permanent, Nothing Safe

Photography has this particular cruelty: the better the photographer, the more clearly they show you somewhere you’re not. Duran Levinson—who has shot for VICE, Red Bull, and BMW, the reliable holy trinity of brands that want their imagery to feel alive without being accountable—flew to Thailand with that problem and came back with something that makes it worse. His pictures of the country don’t resolve into a single mood. They can’t. Thailand doesn’t allow it.

The kingdom was known beyond its own borders as Siam for centuries, before a nationalist government renamed it in 1939—a name meaning, roughly, "land of the free," which has always been doing a lot of work for a country with such a complicated relationship to authority and hierarchy. What Levinson seems drawn to are the places where that complexity surfaces: neon-lit nights, the quiet faces of people doing ordinary things, the ordinary life itself, which looks both more vivid and more precarious than any brochure suggests.

I’ve had Thailand sitting in the back of my mind for years without ever getting there. Not with any particular plan—more like an image that keeps reasserting itself. A color temperature. The feeling that something is happening there that doesn’t translate into a caption. Levinson’s photographs are exactly the wrong thing to look at if you’re trying to talk yourself out of going, because they don’t show you a resort. They show you a country where nothing looks permanent, nothing looks entirely safe, and the light has the quality of late afternoon in a place where you’ve already stayed longer than you meant to.