Between Fantasy and Reality
Who is JKboy ?
Jatenipat Ketpradit, alias JKboy, has practised photography for about ten years. In 2017, he joined the top 100 of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year, and has since collaborated with major magazines such as National Geographic (Spain), The Guardian (UK), Bangkok Post (Thailand) or the technical Photo and Technique International Magazine.
JKboy is breaking the conventions of documentary photography with vibrant landscapes bursting with colour and carefully curated tribal portraits.
Wild territories
A TRIBE CALLED QUEST
On a trip to Mongolia, JK Boy shared the lives of Mongolian tribes for several weeks. It was a revelation for the photographer who, since then, has roamed the world in search of landscapes and peoples in the remotest corners of the earth, such as Indonesia or Ethiopia.
Here, he presents us with photographs of grandiose landscapes and portraits from the tribes he encounters. Flash, post-production: the photographer does not mask his commitment to sublimating reality by tapping into the aesthetic codes of cinema. Tradition and modernity collide and highlight the challenges faced by these ancestral tribes, threatened by the industrial world as well as the climatic stakes of today.
The poses are often front-facing, featuring proud faces and an endless landscape as a backdrop. Are we, the viewer, looking at these men and women from the other side of the world or are the models themselves looking at us through the lens?
The series of photos that YellowKorner is presenting is the one for which he obtained the award of International Portrait Photographer of the Year in 2022. It is a portrait of a man from the Suri tribe in Ethiopia, accompanied by his children and holding a machine gun in his hand. The contrast between his traditional garb and this weapon is striking:
“I took this photo to show the conflicts that the Suri are confronted with as part of their way of life”
