There is a touch of surrealism, details that blend together in a dream-like brightness, architecture that would better lend itself to a Tolkien novel than to the rigors of scientific documentation. In his photographic research, Martin Reeves coaxes something as solid as stone into an ethereal world, as weightless as it is intriguing. These images relate the photographer's most intimate sensations surrounding the complexities of Eastern culture, be it in India or Thailand. As a youngster the English Reeves began using a black & white Polaroid camera as a kind of visual diary, "To make up for a bad memory!" he recalls. A self-taught professional, he began the first of his many extended trips to the East about ten years ago and has since returned many times. He felt an increasing attraction to this part of the world as it began to open his mind to a culture so different from the one he had grown up in. Rediscovered only at the end of the last century, the ruins of Angkor, ancient capital of the kingdom of Khmer in Cambodia, are for Reeves what the Roman Forum must have been for northern Europe's touring intellectuals in centuries past. The photographer eventually decided to make his home in Bangkok, and currently works for the Tourist Authority of Thailand, apart from the personal research he carries out, as published here. If on the one hand the infrared film he uses produces whites that would be unobtainable with any other film -- providing that glowing look that adds more than a bit to the images' surrealistic qualities -- even in that instant before clicking the shutter, while looking at the world through a red filter, must have heightened the photographer's awareness of reality's relativity. As Reeves has been at work on the project for a decade now in locations all through Burma, Cambodia, India, and Thailand, he recently decided it was time to begin sharing the fruit of his research and began by hanging a personal at the About Photography gallery in Bangkok. His meticulously chosen points of view and wide-angle views give the landscapes an almost three-dimensional sense of grandeur and consistency. The heightened depth of focus and respect for the traditional "rules" of good photography bring these images tantalizingly close to fine documentation, and therein lies their allure. The infrared film just adds that slightly spectral quality that permits the viewer some freedom of interpretation. The trees might have silvery leaves or the light appear to be coming from within the stone: this slight deception on the photographer's part is enough to suggest that his is an art that interprets rather than simply reproducing the real.

© Martin Reeves