Samuel Benoit

THEN / NOW

While I was in the geopolitical neighborhood this year I had the chance to offer a month of service with the Baha’i community of Thailand, one of the sites of my 2003-2004 youth year of service.  The Thai Baha’i community is a young one compared to many other countries, but many of their earliest members are starting to die off, so the community is particularly interested in capturing its own history right now.  As part of that effort they sent me to a few places to find and digitally archive (read: scan) as many old photos as I could find. Along with these photos, I was to shoot some that would be used in the relaunch of their website and for promotional material.

Sitting in an historical vacuum and scanning more than 2,000 photos gave me a warped appreciation of the community’s history – one told entirely in images, most of them rigidly staged.  It was also a neat way to learn more about some people I already knew, and all about others that I had never met.  At one point I had the chance to meet one of the very first Thai Baha’is in Chiang Mai after already seeing hundreds of pictures of her going back to the ’70s.

Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, and its Head from 1921 to 1957 left volumes of writings and translations as just a part of a legacy that continues to guide the entire Baha’i community.  In his writing he would often leave the explanation of important events to a group of people he referred to as the future historians.  In my reading of a book of his letters collected under the title The World Order of Baha’u’llah, I found at least six references to these future people who will be tackling the past.  As the above then/now shots illustrate, history repeats whether we know what happened or not, so we might as well find out what happened.  So here’s to the future historians who will be surrounding all those beautiful pictures with beautiful words.

Also posted on my flickr site are a handful of photos from Chiang Mai.  Not too many, because I didn’t really see or do anything in the tourist-popular city, I spent most of the time indoors, sweating, eating junk food, and scanning.