Akkara Naktamna
The photo series "Her Favorite Places" of Ploy Nipatutit tells the story of a person through photographs. In this case, it's the artist's deceased grandmother. The Photograph of the artist's grandmother is placed in various locations, both places she visited during her lifetime and places she never went. The artist imagines and experiments with placing the grandmother's image in these strange places. The feelings of the artist and the viewers are affected in different ways, leading to a series of questions and answers that are not specific to the artist or viewer.
Can we consider this work a family photo? This is an interesting question. To consider this, we might need to compare the work with our previous understanding. Generally, family photos consist of family members, activities in a specific location, aiming to record events for future recollection and to affirm to ourselves, family (and the world) that it actually happened and we were part of that still, motionless image (including time). Photographs are one of the closest forms of evidence to the truth. They contain a wealth of memories packed into a two-dimensional surface of paper or a digital file encoded with zeros and ones.
A particularly notable family photography series is "As Time Goes By" by Lek Kiatsirikajorn. This work juxtaposes images of the artist's parents with their aging home. The inevitable decline of both the house and its inhabitants is a central theme. While the house and its furnishings can be renovated or replaced, the spiritual concept of "home" is not simple like that. It flows inexorably with time, like a seemingly still stream that never flows backward. Lek's series quietly and beautifully gathers the scattered fragments of family relationships, immersing each photograph with profound meaning.
In "Her Favorite Places," Ploy reworks the traditional process of family photography by overlaying one image onto another. She shifts events that typically occur within a single photograph into a different image, such as an image of her grandmother. By incorporating imagined or fictional events, she expands the meaning of family photography, moving beyond the linear timeline of past events. This allows her to explore new narratives, delving into her personal connection with her grandmother and broader societal understandings of family.
Although the work lacks the typical elements of a traditional family photo and seems strange, this strangeness might make us stop and think about the underlying concept that conveys a small part of what a family is. It's about longing for the personal past, exploring memories through conceptually complex photographic works expressed through the simple layering of one photo on another, yet conveying the human relationship centered around family in the most intimate way.
