Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone [Hardcover]

Nick Nostitz (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2001

120 color and black-and-white photographs

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Bangkok's sexual underground, "worlds meet, the rich, the poor.... In some rare moments of animalistic freedom, drunkenness and ecstasy, differences disappear, man, woman, man-woman." In Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone, German photojournalist Nick Nostitz chronicles that money-driven convergence. Nostitz, who worked on the book for seven years, toured Patpong's streets, discos, go-go bars and "blow-job bars," forming close relationships with his subjects male and female prostitutes, transsexuals, junkies, tourists, misfits and expatriates. He presents his deliberately chaotic photos in scrapbook form with handwritten captions, and in accompanying essays he meditates on his Bangkok experiences, which include having sex with a hooker who said she had AIDS. Few readers will be convinced by Nostitz's celebrations of Third World exploitation by first world "misfits," but the pictures remain luridly compelling. 120 color and b&w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

Not so much "Around the World in 80 Lays," more a jaw-dropping insight into a round-the-clock business culture where anything is possible and all major cards are accepted. But Nick Nostitz's visual tour de force is far more than just a voyeur's wet dream -- it's a portrait of an extraordinary way of life. Because it sees both sides of the story, this book makes a serious contribution to the sexploitation debate. There may be a recherché allure to the hookers turning tricks in go-go bars and the weird, twilight world of the transsexuals but they're just bit-part players in a greater drama -- a shifting world of illusion and reality, captured by the camera.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Westzone; 1St Edition edition (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0953743829
• ISBN-13: 978-0953743827
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,191,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Patpong After Dark: And Dark It Is, January 25, 2004

By 

Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone (Hardcover)

Nick Nostitz in PATPONG: BANGKOK'S TWILIGHT ZONE has written a photo-essay volume that casts some much needed light on a city that paradoxically trumps its myriad sins in a much lighted way but the city itself, its non-sex worker population, and its sustaining ethos and culture needs the very sort of attention that books like this one too often skimp on. The result, therefore, is a re-examination of a city that is probably the most sex-driven in the world. Many of the photos are of good looking Thai prostitutes in mini-skirts, but the cumulative impact grows progessively more saddened and less erotic. The photos are accompanied by small commentaries that shed some minor light as to why these sex trade women peddle themselves. Nostitz indicates that Bangkok had learned that since the end of the second world war its primary coin had to be its women. The corruption of the various regimes since then and the ubiquitousness of rapacious American servicemen and Japanese male tourists fueled the demand for the very women whose salacious pictures form the book. As I took in one picture after another, I could see both the surface allure and the less obvious repellence of the sex trade. Clearly, easy and cheap sex with bar girls, hookers, strippers, and transsexuals are the upside of what a male vistor with liberal spending habits can expect. The downside is the less obvious flirtation with HIV and the general slimy feeling that one gets when one uses money to obtain cheaply what one cannot get more honestly in one's home country. PATPONG: BANKOK'S TWILIGHT ZONE manages to explore both pictorially and verbally the allure that sleaze has for the decent if ignorant male tourist with excessive dollars in his pocket.