Vanishing memories

Solo show captures fleeting timelessness of Thailand

The title alone of Ohm Phanphiroj’s solo photography show at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Memoirs: Thailand As It Was and Is, gives an indication of the sense of timelessness captured in the artist’s black-and-white photographs.

Movement and progression in the images mimic the ocean tide — a subtle ebb and flow that wears down glass and rock and shells into smooth remnants, but maintains a metronomic tranquility, ubiquity and sameness. The Thai native concentrates on the aspects of his country that obdurately remain despite the intrusion of Western consumer goods and deceptively termed “progress.” A conflicted project, Memoirs comes out of a documentary, ethnographic tradition, which has so often fixated on the exotica of faraway (aka non-Western) lands. In Phanphiroj’s case, however, it is tempting to see a greater sense of melancholy and a personal investment in place enhanced by the foamy, delicate grays of his images. At times the graininess of the photographs is so extreme, its formal properties give the impression of a vanishing place.

Born and educated in Thailand, now living in Georgia, Phanphiroj gives the disquieting impression of a photographer forced to look at a part of himself that has painfully separated — a sensation not unlike the common experience of reuniting with a long-lost friend or looking at old photographs and the conflicted feelings of pleasure and sadness such circumstances create. Phanphiroj’s images suggest the futile act of any photograph — to capture something vanished, magnified by the circumstance of the self-willed exile who can never go home again.

Phanphiroj’s photographs of a young boy standing, eyes downcast, at the edge of the sea, or of a gridlock of wooden dinghies clogging a narrow waterway or a group of monks posed against the sea smoking cigarettes in Memoirs are the visual signposts of the artist’s bittersweet recall. The work illustrates how all the changes that have affected one’s brain and body over the passage of time are not matched in a return to the familiar, whose people look back at you with the same steady gaze. Even the images that might signal movement and mania are rendered surprisingly calm in Phanphiroj’s hand, like that traffic jam of boats, which the artist’s slightly overhead, distanced perspective endows with an element of placidity.

The photographs are uniformly well-crafted, if a little vague. They undoubtedly gain their greatest impact from the artist’s investment in a place he has left behind — a sensation of loss and longing almost everyone can understand. Several of the images stand alone through sheer drama and peculiarity. “Rooted Buddha Head” is one of them, a thicket of trees which have grown around the tranquil countenance of the Buddha’s face like a terrestrial birth canal or some grudging, earthly accommodation made for tradition.

That almost-smiling, cryptic expression of the Buddha with its preternatural calm defines the body of Phanphiroj’s work, of a child playing with a small boat at the water’s edge, an old woman preparing food, a leathery, weathered grandmother in a wooden boat. The women in the images seem uniformly weary-looking, busy with the ordinary tasks that define their days. The majority of images capture people in solitude, separate from others, which also contributes to the air of separation between the photographer and the world he documents.

The artist notes in a press release for the show, that “these photographs are an attempt to capture the old Thai way of life during this upheaval of modernization. It is my way of documenting the gradual effects of this transformation on my people and culture as a whole.” Save for indications of more contemporary times — a Nescafe can amidst a woman’s cooking utensils, a Carlesberg beer umbrella at the beach — the people and their actions suggest the kind of endlessly repetitive tasks performed by a peasant class across the globe. The recurring trope of train and small boat doubly enhances this feeling that things are not advancing at a digital speed but at the same languid pace that they always have.

But after contemplating the show, Phanphiroj’s fears take on a tangible weight. The silently resistant people and lifestyles depicted in Memoirs are sure to be vanquished in the inevitable march of global culture, and Phanphiroj’s images serve not only as a respectful tribute but as a somber memorial. u

Memoirs: Thailand As It Was and Is runs through July 21 at Callanwolde Gallery, second floor, 980 Briarcliff Road. Open Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 404-872-5338.??