THE BUS CONDUCTOR
Tara Patumnakul
teammytr@gmail.com / Instagram : teammytr
Bus conductor (or known as กระเป๋ารถเมล์ in Thai) is a person who is in charge of their bus, they ensure the safety, communicates to their driver and has a range of responsibilities such as collecting fares, making changes, and issuing tickets to hundreds of passengers a day. Their work requires high tolerance and patience due to the highly repetitive actions they have to perform under the limited conditions the environment provides.
Bus conducting was a common service until the early 1980s in most countries in the world and has been done by electronic machines or the drivers themselves by the early 2000s, which means that bus conductors here are actually doing work by machines in other countries. The fact that this service still exists in Thailand, this project aims to empower and raise awareness of the value of their work, and question the issue of future replacement as well.
“The Bus Conductor” is a series of multidisciplinary photography that visualizes bus conductors by using machine and repetition as the core visual metaphor to depict how highly repetitive work can loosen human behavior emotionally and physically, with sound design in a loop from the elements collected from their actions and environments to auralize the repetitiveness and long working hours as the sound is designed to be both mechanical and in a loop like a clock. Yet the manipulation of them conveys a sense that there is more than one bus conductor providing services in one bus but actually it’s just one bus conductor that goes around the bus to a tremendous amount of passengers individually.
Work Process
Other Works
