The Cost of Paradise

In 2012, I documented what lies behind the glossy image of paradise on the Indonesian islands of Bali, Gili Meno, and Gili Trawangan. While tourists arrived in search of peace and beauty, another story was unfolding just out of sight—one of sweat, exhaustion, and quiet endurance.

This series focuses on the workers building the very foundations of luxury tourism. Many were migrants from other parts of Indonesia, living in makeshift shelters next to construction sites, working long hours under the tropical sun with little or no safety gear. Their tasks were physically demanding and often dangerous: mixing cement by hand, carrying heavy loads across unstable scaffolding, or working barefoot among exposed steel and sharp debris.

Despite their central role in shaping the new identity of these islands, the workers remained invisible—excluded from the economic benefits their labor made possible. Their daily reality stood in contrast to the leisure and luxury marketed to foreign visitors. Most earned barely enough to cover their living expenses.

The Cost of Paradise is an attempt to focus on the people whose labor sustains the entire tourist economy. Through these images, I aim to give visibility to their presence, to their dignity, and to the injustice of a system that profits from their invisibility.

By confronting the physical toll of this labor and the inequality embedded in tourism-driven development, the series asks viewers to reconsider what paradise really costs—and who ends up paying for it.