We found this piece in a small stained glass workshop tucked behind a bakery in Prague’s Malá Strana district. Like many Thais escaping Bangkok’s non-existent winter, we’d come to Europe seeking actual cold, actual snow, actual reason to wear the coats collecting dust in our closets. What we didn’t expect was to find home staring back at us – quite literally – through colored glass in a stranger’s studio window.
The artist had created the elephant years ago for a Thai exchange student who never returned to collect it. When we asked to borrow it for a photoshoot and offered payment, she refused every attempt – waving her hands exactly like any Thai auntie would when you try to pay for the extra portion she’s already scooping onto your plate. The next morning, her assistant arrived with the carefully wrapped piece and a massive bag of homemade Czech dumplings. Fuel for our photo day, she insisted. Twelve thousand kilometers from Bangkok, we felt right at home.
We spent the day positioning the piece against various backdrops, fingers frozen, warming ourselves on dumplings between shots. Using a Canon R5 with an 85mm lens at f/5.6, we waited for that perfect alignment – sunrise piercing directly through the elephant’s eye. In Thai culture, elephants see everything and forget nothing. They carry the memory of the land. That single beam of light through amber glass became the elephant looking back toward home, toward the warmth it came from, seeing clearly through the frozen European morning.
When we returned the piece, we couldn’t leave it behind. The elephant had waited years for someone to see it properly – we couldn’t abandon it again. We insisted on buying it. She refused payment three times before finally accepting, tears in her eyes, grateful that her work would finally complete its journey to Thailand. Her only request: send a postcard once it finds its permanent home. The elephant now sits in our studio entrance, greeting every client with morning light streaming through its eye. The postcard is already in the mail. Some things are meant to find their way home, even if it takes a decade and a detour through a Prague winter to get there.