Every Tuesday, the weekly Cabinet meeting takes place at Government House. As I drove by Government House one day, two large groups of protestors had gathered. On the pavement opposite were over a hundred saffron-robed monks along with more than a thousand disciples and white-robed nuns, holding cloth banners, yellow Buddhist and red, white and blue Thai national flags. On the Government House side of the street, some two hundred former bank staff—men in white shirts and ties, women in bank uniforms—were rallying with their banners.

The Thai mid-summer sun beat down. Amidst the chaos of traffic, impassioned voices shouted their demands through megaphones. Protestors went onto the street. I thought suddenly, “What is happening to this country? How come even monks are protesting alongside everyone else instead of staying peacefully inside their monasteries?” I stopped the car, grabbed my camera and began recording this event, without any clear idea of what I would do with the result.

From that day on, I always tried to get to Government House every Tuesday for a year to photograph protest groups, in an attempt to understand. Such a project should at the very least yield some clues about Thai social and political problems; it should reveal something of the way this country is administered and ruled.

Some Tuesdays could be as quiet as a cemetery. But some Tuesdays yielded three or four major protests, involving hundreds or thousands, like a trade fair displaying “Problems of the People”.

Meanwhile, every Wednesday morning I would diligently check the various newspapers for reports of the previous day’s protests. More often than not, they did not make the news. However hard the protestors strove to make their demonstrations colourful, eg. by pouring pig shit on themselves; threatening to immolate themselves with fire or releasing lizards, all such strategies became nothing more than a bit of spicy sauce, devoid of worth and meaning in the mass media business of the present time.

I have been both an observer (photographer) and a participant (protestor). I can tell you that no one protests for fun. As one protestor told me, “I really don’t want to be sitting here like this. I’m embarrassed to meet the eyes of people driving by in their cars. Some of them look at us with such contempt. But we have no choice.”