West Phillips

Bangkok: Archy, part 2

Added 2021-11-29 13:01:01 +0000 UTC

This series is a serious throwback! I had to go back and give these images a fresh coat of retouching and love. I hope you enjoy them!

I was staying in Bangkok for a couple months or so, after traveling throughout Asia and taking a much needed break from my life in Beijing. Before leaving China I had wrapped up a really nice gig and decided to take the money and hit the road.

Thailand was a very different experience for me - vastly different from China. You'd think that it'd be easy to find good looking, fit Thai guys willing to model shirtless, underwear and nude. In fact, it isn't and that surprised the hell out of me. Thai culture is surprisingly conservative and traditional, despite all we see about the gay scene and such. Modeling and entertainment is big business in Thailand and also, specifically, pageants and events that require male models (female also, of course, but that doesn't really concern me 😆). At the time, I photographed a handful of guys who worked with agencies and did such events and fashion shows and NONE of them would do underwear photoshoots with me because they said having such images would prevent them from finding work. Shirtless was fine - but ideally with jeans or long pants. This blew my mind and perhaps it's changed a bit since then, but it really put a cramp in my style. Granted, I still managed to do some underwear and even full nude photoshoots, but not with any 'serious' or aspiring model. Archy here was one exception. In later images I'll share we did underwear, but not nude. The underwear was a big gamble for him and required a lot of trust from him, so we ended up doing them a month or so later, after getting to know each other more.

Thailand, September 2013