After using black and white photography, Dham Srifuengfung gets the most out of color. It is in Bangkok that the photographer was born and in London that he works. With his series “Swim to Me“, he writes a love letter, where his child nanny becomes the main heroine, to all the people he loved and still loves. No doubt the images of Dham Srifuengfung always give pride of place to the models and therefore, the people.How and when did you realize that photography was your own way to create ?

Eversince, I first got my own camera, it was a polaroid camera that my parents bought for me at the airport in Tokyo. We almost missed our flight! I think I was 8 or 9, I don’t really remember. It really felt like a moment because I am the youngest of four so getting something brand new was always a moment. I have always been much more interested in pencils, paint and paper for a long time, and photography was just another tool to aid that process. So working with a camera has always been a necessity. I think that cinema was what made me plunge deeper into the medium

How would you describe your photographic aesthetic ? What serie are you the most proud of ?

I think that with everything going on in the world around, hopefully, my photos can provide an escape. Something mellow, something sweet for the eyes and the soul! I would say that with age, I have become more and more “politically aware”. If I have something to say in my photos, I think for this moment in time, it will never be too obvious. I love “Swim to Me”. The one I shot at my family home in Bangkok. And the beauty of that particular project is that it means different things to different people, or at least from what have been told to me!

 

How do you succeed to take the best, but also the bizarre and the candid from your model ?

That’s a really tough question! Some days, you wake up and all the creative juices you have has completely dried up! You try your best to do your job, try to look at things from another point of view, put yourself in different shoes. The bizarre I think is great. I feel like everything can feel so serious at times and why not laugh and have a bit of fun! Happiness is so hard to come by these days. The subject is usually the most interesting aspect to me, there are so many questions we can ask: why are they here? How did they get here? and how did we end up in this place together! If you have a subject that you are invested in and curious about, apart from making sure you frame things correctly and the lighting is how you want it to be, you are done! That is it! It is always about the people!

 

How do you manage to cultivate your inspiration for photography ?

Inspiration is a funny word, it could pretty much be anything you want it to be, which is great but also a hindrance. There is also no way to quantify or explain them. I expect that some may want me to say something like colours, because some of my images are colourful, which I guess is cool and probably accurate. But for me I would show them this video I took the other week (or mostly anything I post on stories) and they would look at me like we are speaking two different languages. So what I am saying is that photography becomes a way you explain your inspiration and in turn, the images itself could inspire something else and that something else will probably make me want to pick up my camera!