Globe-trotting Thai photographer Witchawin Panyasombat, a.k.a. Ice Ice Babe, has spent the past five years traveling the world with his large format camera, and now he’s embarking on an ongoing project that will gradually bridge the concepts of life, faith, place, and culture.

 

Visit Patina, the uber-cool new cafe set along Charoenkrung Road near Chinatown’s Soi Nana, between Feb 20-Mar 20 to see the start of Ice Ice Babe’s Living Crisis exhibition.

 

The project will ultimately see the artist travel across 14 different countries, from neighboring places like Cambodia and Vietnam to farflung destinations like Georgia, Iraq, and Mongolia—as soon as international trips are possible again—to take 30 large format photos using his Linhof Technickardan S 45.

 

Those images will all eventually be displayed in hospitals across Bangkok, bringing life to places many associate with death.

 

Living Crisis is Ice Ice Babe’s first solo exhibition, but the photographer has followed a hardscrabble journey across the world with his old-school film camera over the years, yielding some fascinating experiences.

 

In 2016, he worked with a Dutch news agency to document a North Sea fishing expedition, taking public transportation from Bangkok to Russia, then all the way to Istanbul and up to Norway. Later, he would shoot goldmines in Africa and backpack across India with his unwieldy Technickardan S 45, a large format camera made in the 1970s that yields a sort of washed aesthetic in its images.