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(UN)IDENTIFIED: DÉTOURNED

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MODERN SIAM

Key Words VISUAL ESSAY


archive • colonialism • criminology •
détournement • history • memory • NIGEL POWER
photography • portraiture • Siam • King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand
visual culture
Visual Communication 2015,
Vol. 14(4) 423–436
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI 10.1177/1470357215594113

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ABSTRACT
This visual essay weaves together images from an artistic research project with discussion
of the critical and historical contexts which animated and informed it. The images –
for the most part – are composites of late 19th and early 20th century photographic
portraits discovered by chance in the National Archive of Thailand.
In November 2014 these were exhibited at H Project Space, a Bangkok gallery
located in a neo-colonial house built by an Anglo-Thai couple around the same time
as the photographs were taken. For this, the composites were generated in real time
using software designed by the author. These were projected at monumental scale
to create two immersive spaces. In the interests of clarity, images from this exhibition
and others generated during the visual research process are included here.
The inquiry sought to raise questions about overlooked and taboo aspects of Thai history
and to relate these to a political present characterised by mass censorship, curtailed
freedom of expression and a heavily policed visual culture.

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We are confronting then, a double system of representation
capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively.
This double operation is most evident in the portrait.
Allan Sekula

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The American artist Renée Green often
refers to an odd and anomalous prop-
erty of the archive (Green, 2002).
That is, the recurring and disruptive
significance of chance and seren-
dipity in an institution that is, above
all, predicated on order, structure and
predictability. According to Green,
the archive is haunted by moments of
counter intuitive unpredictability that
she terms ‘lacunae’: unforeseen or
overlooked fissures within a classifica-
tory logic that seeks at once to produce
and naturalise social and epistemo-
logical boundaries. It is in these gaps
that ‘records’ become unruly, perturb
official narratives and insinuate new
modes of remembering. It is here that
‘documents’ murmur of different ways
of bringing the past into the present
and seeing the present in the mirror of
the past.
Whilst working on historical research
in the National Archive of Thailand we
chanced upon two such ‘lacunae’. The
first was a collection of photographic
portraits consigned to a kind of non-
category. On the fringe of the main
archive are three or four filing cabi-
nets dedicated to people whom the
archivists have, as yet, been unable to
identify. Amongst these, we became
intrigued by a large set of studio por-
traits from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, a pivotal period in modern
Thai history.

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By the early 19th century, Siam was how photography was used to work
a loosely structured and shifting set through the problems and possibilities
of geopolitical alliances rather than of self-presentation in changing times.
the centralised nation state that we Whilst this photographic technology
know today as Thailand. Whilst it is had arrived in the trunks of colonial
true that a Bangkok-based Siamese adventurers seeking ‘god, gold and
elite was dominant politically and mil- glory’, it was quickly domesticated and,
itarily, political relationships were as Peleggi (2002) describes, played
highly ambiguous with minor players an important role in constructing and
often paying tribute to more than one communicating the visual identity of
regional power. In other words, polit- the modernising Thai elite.
ical power was diffuse: strong at the Of course, colonial interests brought
centre yet weakening the further one more to Siam than the camera. Whilst it
went from the capital (Chaiyan, 1994). is an article of faith in nationalist Thai
In the mid-19th century, however, Siam historiography that Siam was never col-
sought to capture this unruly geopo- onised, the truth is somewhat different.
litical patchwork and bind it together By the end of the 19th century, imperial
as a modern nation state: to establish powers – particularly Britain – were
the geo-body of the nation to adopt a de facto colonists of Siam, with great
theoretical concept coined by Thai his- influence in the political and economic
torian Thongchai Winichakul (Thong- life of the emerging state (Chaiyan,
chai, 1997). 1994). Moreover, both the new Siamese
Yet a nation-state needs more than fixed state and the colonialists had interests
and stable borders. It requires elite in common. For example, whilst Britain
political and social actors fit for the raft needed teak – which was plentiful
of new ideological and administrative in the northern territories – Bangkok
tasks that the state form necessitates. required means of imposing centra-
By far the largest group of the uniden- lised power over local rulers. Working
tified subjects that comprised our first together economically, politically and
lacuna were representatives of this militarily, the external and internal
transforming Siamese elite. Drawing colonisers were, at one and the same
upon a range of apparently contradic- time, able to fix the boundaries of the
tory symbolic registers: bureaucratic Siamese geo-body and ensure the flow
and bourgeois, indigenous and interna- of commodities from periphery to colo-
tional, traditional and modern, martial nial centre (Chaiyan, 1994). It is not
and civilian – these images depict surprising, therefore, that the second

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But more insidious, more penetrating than likeness,
the Photograph sometimes makes appear what we never
see in a real face, or in a face reflected in the mirror.
Roland Barthes

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component of our first lacuna was pho- involuntary portraits were arresting in
tographic portraits of forgotten colo- their own right: signal examples of early
nial agents and their families. photography’s other role as the visual
Whilst this first lacuna occupied a kind medium of criminology, anthropology
of categorical limbo, the second had and colonialism – the representation
escaped the classificatory logic of and production of dangerous others.
the archive altogether. On a table by Seen alongside our studio portraits,
the door, we encountered loose piles however, they both animated and illus-
of unlabelled photographic reproduc- trated a contradiction closer to home,
tions – ordered but not collected – a contradiction that continues to haunt
now offered for sale. Amongst these Thai society to this day: the simulta-
we came across a small set of images neous construction of centres of spec-
of dishevelled and manacled men from tacular power, status and authority, and
the same period as the studio por- subordinate peripheries of class, region
traits. These figures were elusive. and ethnicity. Indeed, our century-old
The archivists were unable to help subjects – the Bangkok elite, with their
us locate them. Yet further research troubled relationship to Western con-
finally identified them as captives ceptions and lifestyles – and margina-
from a local insurrection in the North. lised political actors seeking recogni-
They are imprisoned or executed tion for regional and class interests, are,
resisters to both the loss of customary once again, at the heart of the current
forest rights to British teak exploitation political conflict gripping Thailand.
and Bangkok’s attempts to replace These issues and reflections animated
regional with centralised power. These our approach to this archival material.

It was the friendship with imperialism that brought the


Northern part of Siam into the orbit of the Bangkok powers.
Chaiyan Rajchgool

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There is no cultural document that is not at the same time
a record of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin

We saw the potential of bringing these ‘blurred fictitious apparitions’ – as Sekula


three pools of usually discrete and over- (1986) described them – détourning Gal-
looked images and the historical actors ton’s optical empiricism and eugenically
and subjects they represent together: inspired rationalism along on the way.
of bringing them into an overdue visual The result is an endlessly repeating
and political dialogue with each other. series of long and extremely slow
In order to achieve this, we synthe- dissolves of randomly selected and
sised an aesthetic concept with an his- monumentally projected photographs.
torical precedent. The concept was Most often, these slowly produced
détournement. Simply put, this Situ- composite and ambiguous portraits of
ationist method involves the subver- the largest group of images: members
sion or semantic short-circuiting of of the transforming elite. Yet other times
appropriated imagery. The prece- more dramatic – sometimes poignant,
dent was drawn from an early moment often grotesque – montages of social
of contact between criminology and difference appeared, composites of
photography, the composite photo- forgotten social actors who, though
graphs of the English Victorian polymath deeply interconnected historically, live
Sir Francis Galton. In these, Galton over- separate lives in both the archive and
laid a variety of criminal subjects in the in Thai society today.
belief that an optical record of a criminal
type or social average would emerge.
Of course, no such subjects appeared.
Yet we borrowed the form of these

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REFERENCES ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Chaiyan Rajchgool (1994) The Rise and Fall of the Thai Absolute Monarchy: (UN)IDENTIFIED ran between 13 Novem-
Foundations of the Modern Thai State from Feudalism to Peripheral Capitalism. ber and 14 December 2014 at H Gallery
Banglamung, Thailand: White Lotus Press. Project Space in Bangkok. The exhi-
Green R (2002) Ruminations on archival lacunae. In: Von Bismarck B et al. (eds) bition was researched, designed and
Interarchival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field. Berlin: Verlag der produced by Nigel Power and Dr Juth-
Buchhandlung WalterKönig. amas Tangsantikul. It was curated by
Peleggi M (2002) The Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Dr Brian Curtin.
Modern Image. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Sekula A (1986) The body and the archive. October 39, Winter. FUNDING
Thongchai Winichakul (1997) Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. This research received no specific grant
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. from any funding agency in the public,
commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Original photographs courtesy of the National Archives of Thailand. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


NIGEL POWER is a British-born and Bang-
kok-based artist, designer and academic.
His current research work explores visual
culture and historical memory in modern
Thailand. Nigel leads the MfA in Visual
Communication at King Mongkut’s Uni-
versity of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok.

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