We received these images from Elizabeth Waterman. They were accompanied by this text:
As the epicenter of South Asia’s sex industry, Thailand had appealed to me for years. I finally went there for the first time in 2023. What I discovered was a world of women and Ladyboys (transgender women) working a money game. I have since returned three more times to photograph and capture interviews of Thailand’s far ranging nightlife entertainers, from gogo dancer in the Nana entertainment complex in Bangkok, to the high end ‘models’ in Bangkok’s Pleasure Palaces on Ratchadaphisek Road, to the thousands of freelance escorts lining the beach walkways of the resort city of Pattaya.
These women and Ladyboys work largely in the shadows, with most parts of their job being illegal. Working in such a fashion has allowed them to earn a respectable income, and in many cases, a better life for their families. However, sex work is not without its challenges, and for some life can be difficult and exhausting.
My work calls attention to the various inequalities that Ladyboys in particular experience, and underscores the need for legal changes in Thailand benefitting transgenders. A promising gender-change law, titled the ‘Gender Recognition Act’ is stalled right now in Thailand’s Parliament. This law would provide legal rights to transgenders, including the tens of thousands of Ladyboy entertainers. In changing their gender legally, the Gender Recognition Act, if passed into law, would open up their scope of career options, so that they might work more easily outside of nightlife. This bill is little known in Thailand, much less in the outside world, and has received little publicity.
Shot on 35mm film, my photographs present an organic look at a secretive world. Analog limits the frames I can take in a given shoot, and it imprints each one with the unknown. The practice of shooting film invites divinity into each frame. The more behind each shutter click I can carefully grace to chance, to the little happenstances, to the blips and errors of film, the light leaks, the double frames and such, the more sacrosanct the image becomes. The more ‘not-mine’ it becomes. And I live for the ‘not-mine’-ness of art, for the discovery of the things I have not seen before, for the resounding ring of an image filtered down from the larger, grander ‘me’ I cannot see.
The work will be published as a book in 2026 once an appropriate publisher is secured. This is a small preview.
Elizabeth Waterman, April 2025
Elizabeth Waterman is a Los Angeles-based fine art photographer whose work challenges societal narratives around sex work, subcultures, and female empowerment. Through striking analog and film photography, Elizabeth captures the raw, intimate, and often unseen lives of adult entertainers, transgender sex workers, and performers—offering a rare and deeply humanizing perspective.
www.elizabethwaterman.com
