Life moves fast in Bangkok. In a city of over 8 million people, someone's always on the move. However, Thai photographer Rammy Narula found peace in an unlikely place: the Hua Lamphong Train Station.
Hua Lamphong, known more formally as the Bangkok Train Station, is the city's main railway station, the terminus of lines headed north, south and east through Thailand and for the city's mass transit system. It also is the end of the line for slower "excursion" trains into the countryside, popular with tourists and photographers. "I feel like it’s a different side of Bangkok that you see in the train station, it’s not as fast paced as it is in the city," Narula says.
Narula started shooting at Hua Lamphong four years ago, hopping from platform to platform looking for people to photograph. But it wasn't until April that he "saw the light" on Platform 10, where passengers board a train that winds 426 miles north to Chiang Mai. While shooting early one overcast morning, Narula noticed how the light reflected off the train and platform. The haze of diesel smoke and light gave the scene a film noir quality. Narula found it magical, and utterly unique. "I was running across platforms and looking to see if I could get the same thing at a different time of day on a different platform with a different train and I couldn’t,” he says.
Now Narula makes the 30-minute trip to the station from his home in Asoke nearly five times a week to capture the same mood and light. Because the light is so fleeting, he's usually got 20 minutes or so in which to get a shot. “During that 20 minutes, everything happens,” Narula says.
He wanders the platform with a Fuji X-T1, looking for interesting faces, hand gestures and of course, beautiful light. He shoots the daily bustle – passengers stepping on and off the train, cleaners scrubbing windows and conductors ushering people to their seats. The photos are moody, filled with inky blacks and silvery highlights.
Narula visits Platform 10 so often–more than 150 times since April–that station workers recognize him and say hello. He's editing hundreds of photos, selecting those he'll include in a book later this year. And, of course, he's still making photos of a 7 am train that is always just a bit late. "I live in Thailand," he says. "Trains are never on time."
