There's a high chance you'll come across a buffalo cooling itself in a pond or ambling across the land if you travel through rural Thailand.
Liam Morgan saw many buffaloes on his trips and the Bangkok-based artist shot them by literally pulling the trigger as he rode trains across Thailand's countryside. With his camera of course. He rolled along the tracks with only a few mere seconds to consider the frame he would capture as he glimpsed at the creatures.
In the beginning, he was only acting, but as time passed he became a hunter.
"You just shoot, trying your best to get the camera up. Sight the animal and fire," said Morgan.
A photography exhibition featuring the emblematic beast is on display at the Kathmandu Photo Gallery until October 31. A Canadian who's been living in Thailand since 2002, he photographed, developed and hand-printed the stills that make up the show titled "Game: Part 1".
His framed monochrome images of buffaloes are stacked from floor to ceiling on the sunlit second floor of the gallery on Silom Road. A display stands on the opposite side of the room and holds Morgan's weapon of choice -- an SLR camera with a 300 mm telephoto lens, almost standard in appearance, except it's mounted onto a rifle stock. Literally, he shot and ran -- the blurred and inconsistent images developed in his dark room evoke feelings of the past while demonstrating the buffaloes in all their dream and reality in black and white.
Buffaloes are beasts of burden that remains symbolic of Thailand -- or perhaps a part of Thailand. The mention of buffaloes, or kwai, is also often used as a derogatory insult. To be called kwai is to be called slow, stupid and backwards.
To Morgan, adrenalin would surge through him each time the open air train approached a buffalo. The process became methodical, almost like a ritual. Sight, grunt and pull the trigger to prompt the shutter.
Morgan said he rode the trains over and over again, inspired by literature, writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag, history and a daydream.
The project developed as a few years went by and he began to connect his actions to the colonisation of North America. The colonisation eventually brought about non-Indigenous men armed with rifles riding trains to shoot the once seemingly infinite buffalo. Traditionally, the animal provided livelihood to the indigenous population.
Hundreds of thousands of North American buffalo were massacred for sport, which was an act far removed from indigenous traditions of hunting in moderation and using all the animal parts.
Mountainous piles of bones littered the plains where massive herds once thundered. Through literature, Morgan said he started to see slaughter as a clever war tactic.
"It was an effort to control [the indigenous)] or subdue them or kill them. It's a kind of colonisation act or even a genocidal act."
Morgan relates the plight of the North American buffalo to the decline and depreciation of the Thai buffalo.
"I'm not making any direct comparison of wars of genocide and economic subjugation, but I do think that the symbolism sort of comes across, that the traditional way of life has been disrupted."
It is forcing people to alter their way of life by removing or changing the purpose of the animal, he said.
The buffalo is inherently connected to Thailand's development and embedded in its history but the number of working buffaloes continues to shrink.
Today, the majority of Thai farmers hardly ever use the strong buffalo to work in their rice fields, as was traditionally done, but instead raise them as meat for urban populations. Farmers now favour the "iron" buffalo, mechanical equipment, which requires fuel instead of feed and doesn't require a place to sleep or a pond to cool in after a long day's work.
The animals were once multipurpose assets in rural Thai agriculture, but the times have quickly changed.
Morgan explains that the rise in machinery use and the new reliance on buffalo meat sales reflects the decline in the self-sustained farming methods previously seen when buffaloes were employed.
"It's the change of livelihood, which you can also call modernism."
The photographer said the exhibition is not an outright political statement, but he added that the symbol of the buffalo in Thailand cannot be used without taking on political connotations, something he isn't necessarily opposed to.
The idea of chasing buffalo came to him years ago in a daze, as he watched rural scenery slowly pass by on his way back to Bangkok from the south. He gazed out the window and his eyes fell upon a buffalo cooling itself in a pond beside the tracks. Morgan knew he should've taken a picture of it.
"I sat there, day dreaming myself away and my time away. I started to roll it over and over in my head -- what is this compulsion to shoot?" It's a question he still ponders today.
Morgan had faith the train would pass another. He waited, camera in his lap, haunted by the photograph he never took. For the rest of what was to become a multi-year project he was enveloped by the thrill of the hunt.
Part 2 of the exhibition will arrive soon and while Morgan doesn't know much about it he did say the subject will not be the buffalo.
'Game: Part 1' is on display at Kathmandu Gallery, Pan Road, off Silom. Until Oct 31.
