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By day, the capital displays its well-known faces: temple spires, office towers, food carts, traffic jams. But once the sun sets, a different city comes alive. Neon lights take over and shadows hide details. Strangers slip between worlds. The city’s ability to reinvent itself shines in the hours when certainty fades and suggestion takes over.
This is the Bangkok that photographer Noah Dolinsky captures in Fallen Angels, a captivating new photobook over a decade in the making.
Beautifully produced and carefully printed, Fallen Angels feels more like a series of scenes from an unfinished film than just a collection of photographs. Turning the pages is like moving through a noir dreamscape where each image suggests a story that started before the shutter clicked and continues long after.
‘I didn’t begin with the idea of making a book,’ says Noah. Fallen Angels grew slowly, one portrait at a time, over more than ten years in Bangkok. At first, I was simply drawn to the women I met, their beauty, confidence, vulnerability, resilience and individuality.’
‘In the end, I wanted to make it because a book gives the work a lasting form,’ he says. ‘It slows observation down and lets the pictures speak to each other through sequence and rhythm. It invites the viewer to look more carefully, beyond stereotypes or easy labels.’
Many viewers will immediately appreciate the cinematic quality of the work. Though much is rendered in black and white, the photos don’t have the sharp, documentary style of classic street photography. Instead, Dolinsky’s images are saturated with atmosphere. Dark shadows consume corners of the frame. Light leaks through windows, bounces off mirrors, and wraps around faces.
The book focuses on Thai transgender women, photographed over 10 years. The project never feels like an exercise in categorisation. In a city where transgender people are simultaneously visible and misunderstood, celebrated and stereotyped, Dolinsky avoids making grand statements.
While he is best known as a photographer, Dolinsky is also a filmmaker, having directed several award-winning short films about LGBTQ+ lives and identities. His portraits have been shortlisted three times for the Portrait of Humanity award. Throughout his work, he explores identity not as a fixed label but as something fluid, personal and deeply human.
Instead, he highlights individuals. A glance. A gesture. A cigarette break. A quiet moment in a room. The photographs show people living their own lives rather than performing for the camera.
‘I'm not trying to define anyone. I'm offering space for them to be seen as they are.’
Bangkok has no shortage of photographers looking for exoticism. Dolinsky takes a different path. His Bangkok feels intimate. An emotional landscape. Streets, alleys, apartments, bars, and hotel rooms turn into stages for small human dramas.
The deliberately simple compositions enhance that feeling. Without distractions, viewers focus on expression, posture, texture and mood. The photographs exist somewhere between observation and memory. Sometimes they are sensual; sometimes they are melancholic. Often, they are both.
The book's sequencing adds to the cinematic quality. Rather than follow a traditional narrative, the images accumulate like pieces of memory. Faces return. Locations resonate. Themes of solitude, transformation, vulnerability and resilience appear and disappear.
The emotionally resonant and visually appealing Fallen Angels confirms Noah Dolinsky as a gifted storyteller in both photography and film. Like the city that inspired it, the book reveals more with each return visit, lingering in the mind as a series of unforgettable scenes rather than just a collection of portraits.
FALLEN ANGELS by Noah Dolinsky
Photobook, 204 pp. First Edition 500 copies. Bangkok, 2026
Purchase at https://noahdolinsky.com/fallen-angels or at River City Bangkok Bookstore