I was in Thailand prepping a movie and, while having traveled extensively all over the world, Thailand took my breath away. It was my first time in a Buddhist country and the style and substance of this country was clearly different from any other place I had been. There is a forthcoming graciousness, a generosity of spirit, to be found in the most casual contacts. In the course of criss-crossing Thailand, I spent time whenever I could taking my camera for walks - through the teeming markets, the temples and monasteries, small fishing villages, street shrines. In the cities and countryside, while there is surely poverty, it is rarely of the grinding, oppressive, hopeless type I have seen in so many other places.

On one of my walks I saw this young woman and her dog sleeping on a pedestrian overpass in downtown Bangkok. I try to avoid taking photographs of people in the streets without their permission but in this case, I could not resist trying to capture the poignancy of this 'scene'. The geometry of the configuration, the details - the shoes tied to the rope leash, the hand gesture, the yellow line on the bridge - made a striking composition. And the irony was that just on either side of the pedestrian overpass were six lanes of Bangkok traffic madness.