Fighting For Hope: An Insight Into The World of Muay Thai

• Prize
  Bronze in Editorial/sports
• Photographer
  Lord K2
• Website
  http://www.lordk2.com

You squeeze into the back of a pick-up truck and commute for six hours to support your fellow fighter. You then agree to fight as a last-minute replacement at 2am in chilly, outdoor conditions without knowing anything about your opponent. You fight the next night whilst injured without complaining. You do all this for sustenance and the faint hope that someday, hundreds of fights later, you will earn enough money to retire.  That is the life of a fighter in Thailand. It is the life that I spent five years documenting across all four regions of Thailand.

• Biography
  Lord K2 is a visual artist from London based in Barcelona. In 2011 he seized trading stocks and ventured into the art world. After an initial stint exploring stencil graffiti in South America, Lord K2 shifted his focus to photography in order to pursue ethnographic visual story telling. His first project was to document the graffiti subculture in Santiago de Chile followed by the street art scene in Tokyo. Both projects were released in book form by Schiffer Publishing. He subsequently spent 5 years living in Asia in order to chronicle the Muay Thai and Sumo cultures.