FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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When photos really meant something

When photos really meant something

Some of the best shots ever taken in Thailand are on view in an exhibition of "forgotten masters"

The exhibition “Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography” at the Bangkok University Gallery is an important reminder of the care and knowledge that taking pictures used to require. We’ve come a long way with digital cameras and selfies tumbling out of a phone, but we’ve also lost a lot along the way.
At 77, Pornsak Sakdaenprai is the first to admit that taking photographs used to be a lot of hard work. “Taking a portrait in the studio would take almost the whole day,” he says, and then he’d be condemned to the darkroom for the night, fiddling with rolls of film and chemicals.
Pornsak opened a studio in 1959 in Nakhon Ratchasima and recalls with a chuckle that he had to rely on sunlight for printing his pictures because electricity was still a rarity in the Northeast. But his wasn’t the only photo studio in town. “Most people wanted to have their portraits done to give to loved ones.”
In the exhibition he’s sharing dozens of black-and-white portraits of rural folk in their typical luk thung outfits and also monks – for whom he’d mock up a second version with hair and eyebrows artificially added – long before the invention of Photoshop, of course. 
“The monks wanted pictures to give to women and to their relatives, so we’d ‘edit’ them so it looked like they had hair. That was quite popular at the time!”
Pornsak is among seven pioneers of photography featured in the show being presented as part of Photo Bangkok Festival 2015. Internationally acclaimed photographic artist Manit Sriwanichapoom is the curator, and he’s assembled a remarkable assortment on the second and fourth floors of the gallery. All 200 images are black and white and every one of them was born in a darkroom.
The other not-quite-forgotten masters are Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, ML Toy Xoomsai, Liang Ewe, Saengjun Limlohakul, Rong Wong-Savun and SH Lim (the only other photographer in the group who’s still alive). Since 2011 they’ve all had individual exhibitions at Manit’s Kathmandu Photo Gallery off Silom Road.
Manit spent a great deal of time and effort seeking them out and gathering their widely varying work, but it’s been labour of love, he says.
“When I started teaching creative photography at several universities, all I could find in the way of textbooks were Western photographic histories,” Manit says. “Photography came to Siam back in 1845, towards the end of the reign of King Rama III, so I had to wonder whether there were any Thai photographers whom we might call ‘masters’.”
There were, of course, as Manit soon enough discovered when he set out to compile the first textbook on Thai photography.
“My research started from 1932, the year Thailand became a constitutional monarchy. I was curious to discover how Thais have used photography as a way of expressing their individual identities and their democracy credentials.”
The first “pioneer” was easily enough found – prominent fashion photographer SH Lim, who’s now 85. It was Lim who took that famous picture at the airport of Apasra Hongsakula arriving home in 1965 after being crowned Miss Universe.
“Even though he’s not a photojournalist, his photos capture Thailand’s social transitions from 1957 to 1977, all the historic events and the fashion and celebrity scene,” says Manit, who met Lim at a 2010 exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.
“I’m really impressed by his camera angles and his use of lighting, and the way he gives directions to the models. And the settings are great too, like the model playing golf and another one topless at the beach. That was what modern fashion photography looked like at the time.”
Lim photographed such actresses and models as Priya Rungruang, Orasa Isarangkura Na Ayutthaya and Phusadee Anukkhamontri. In those days he always shot in black and white, but many of the images were colourised to be used on the covers of magazines like Sakul Thai, Bangkok Weekly, Or Sor Tor and Ploenjit.
Lim’s beach bunny is modest in comparison to the eye-popping nudes taken by ML Toy Xoomsai between 1946 and 1961, but their poses are undeniably sophisticated. Widely admired for his unusual angles and dramatic lighting and composition, Toy would ask the models to pose naked or in revealing outfits, and yet the results were never lewd or lurid. “It’s art,” Manit says, “not pornography.”
By way of photojournalism, there are Rong Wong-Savun’s shots documenting an ordinary day at Bangkok’s Memorial Bridge in the late 1950s, and a public school that was perched beside the Din Daeng dump.
Saengjun Limlohakul focused on his hometown, Phuket, towards the end of the great tin-mining boom. You see the peaceful island life, but also American-style strip clubs catering to GIs. One rare image depicts an elephant procession on Phang Nga circa 1955.
Self-taught Chinese-Thai photographer Liang Ewe also chronicled Phuket’s evolution from mining hub to tourist destination, eventually amassing 100,000 negatives in the studio he’d opened in 1932. Among the remarkable shots are Muslim couples of different races and portraits of Peranakan ladies made from 1959 to 1962.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in the show is the clever photographic trickery of the revered monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who used the medium to spread the Buddha’s teachings and made good use of special effects like double (and even triple) exposures. Buddhadasa, who died in 1993, was also an esteemed poet and he would write verse to accompany each image. He had his own darkroom at Suan Mokh, his monastery in Surat Thani.
Manit came across Buddhadasa’s photographic “dharma riddles” in the monk’s book “Dharma Text Next to Image” and spent months on research. He learned that Phra Maha Boonchoo Jittapunyo, then a mere novice in both spiritual and photographic matters, actually took the pictures of Buddhadasa, and Manit interviewed him about the whole process, as captured in a 15-minute video with English subtitles.
Among the images instilled with Buddhist thought, one conveys the “correct way of dying” (righteously and happily). The monk chose a deteriorated picture of himself with eyes closed and then superimposed a lotus flower over top. “No material things form your ego,” reads the poem-caption. “May we all die correctly as such.”
 
STIRRING IMAGES
- “Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography” runs until October 31 at the Bangkok University Gallery, Kluay Namthai.
- Find out more at www.PhotoBangkokFestival.com.
 
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