I took this photograph with a Minolta XG7. This was back in 2012, when I was first becoming accompanied with this island. I remembered driving past these buildings which were at some stage of being demolished, and I knew that I would have to come back one day with my camera. In the following days I headed back with my camera and took some shots.
About two years later now, and I was out scouting some areas to shoot and thought it would be good to go back and check out this spot again. I had remembered seeing lots of graffiti done on the buildings at some point in the past year when passing. However, while trying to find them, I couldn’t seem to locate where they were… it wasn’t long after that I realized that this land had been stripped and they were preparing it for a new development of some sort…
This is the common case here in Phuket, as it also is in a lot of the other populated corners of the world.
The relationship between the tiny bit of earth we populate here and the ones living on it, is not one of respect or of much love. Greed, corruption and ignorance tend to be at the forefront.
When discovering that this place was now gone and soon to become another, it reminded me of these words I had wrote back in my first year here, so I dug them up and felt like sharing 🙂 This is a first ha!
Lets try to listen more often and more closely.
The Island spoke with me today, an exchange of energies.
Her fears have grown bigger, just as her weight has become heavier.
Constant digs at her back, patched up with cement.
Stripped of her eternal skin and remodelled with an expiry date.
The once lush, the now corporate.
She can feel her future and her fears have grown bigger.
I reminded her of her beauty that still remains,
Her untouched mountains and coasts,
Her natural scents and natural growth,
The infinite horizons that surround her and
The untouchable skies that lay above her.
We sat and chatted for a while, in enjoyment and in peace.
Our time was getting shorter and the sun was to decrease.
Her colours filled the sky and the time went quickly by.
A dreamy scene took over, the moon so big and bright.
The darker would remain, till the hour of light.
Jess Robinson 