Human Negotiations

Human Negotiations is an independent, self-funded collaboration between photographer Katharina Hesse and writer Lara Day, exploring the lives of a community of Bangkok sex workers through both images and text.
The project came into being in 2007, when Hesse and Day met during a photography workshop. Over the course of three years, the pair returned to Bangkok’s red-light districts repeatedly to interview and photograph more than two dozen women.
Human Negotiations is not a journalistic account of the sex trade, but instead a personal interpretation of a line of work that is frequently misunderstood. Leaving aside stereotypes of exploited, downtrodden Third World females coerced into a profession in which they are passive victims, the project reveals a more nuanced, open-ended world where women take center stage, and where reality’s complexities leave room for wider interpretations.