Dissident Photography

Glenn Jordan

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink Man Act #1, Silom Road, Bangkok, 1997.

This essay is a draft chapter for Thinking with John Berger (forthcoming).

Dr Glenn Jordan – Research Fellow, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies,
Cardiff University – JordanG2@cardiff.ac.uk.

I am a cultural theorist, ethnographer, photographer and curator. My books include Cultural

Politics (1995, with Chris Weedon), Somali Elders: Portraits from Wales (2004) and Hineni:
Life Portraits from a Jewish Community (2012). I have curated a number of exhibitions –
most notably, A Sikh Face in Ireland and Hineni: Life Portraits from a Jewish Community and
Under the Bridge: Homeless in Cardiff (photographs by Andrew McNeill) I am currently
writing Thinking with John Berger: On Photography, Intellectuals and Criticism (which I
expect to complete by early 2017). Originally from California, I have lived in the UK since
1987.

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 I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often
judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future
what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
John Berger 1992: 9

Photographic mise-en-scene, the staging of a scene for the camera, encourages

the production of intricate fictions, diverse selves, dramas of fantasy and desire.
Whitney Chadwick 2001: 14

In Violence (2009), Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, retells
a story of an encounter between Pablo Picasso and a German officer. Listen:

According to a well-known anecdote, a German officer visited Picasso in his

Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked
at the modernist ‘chaos’ of the painting, asked Picasso, ‘Did you do this?
Picasso calmly replied: ‘No, you did this!’
Slavoj Zizek 2009: 9

The story is instructive. Of all of Picasso’s paintings, Guernica (1937) is the most
explicitly political – and the most powerful. In John Berger’s book on Picasso, there
is a description of the context – the historical conjuncture – within which this artwork
came about:

On 27 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica (population 10,000) was

destroyed by German bombers flying for General Franco. Here is the report from
The Times:

Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their
cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent
air-raiders. The bombardment of the open town far behind the lines occupied
precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of
aeroplanes consisting of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers
and Heinkel fighters, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing
from 1,000 lab. Downwards… The fighters meanwhile flew low from above
the centre of the town to machine-gun those of the civilians who had taken
refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was soon in flames except the
historic Casa de Juntas…

In less than a week Picasso began his painting…

John Berger 1980 (orig. 1965): 164

Guernica is an intervention – a potent, cultural-political enunciation – against

fascism, against the horror of war. It is a response to a particular event, produced
“urgently and quickly” (Berger 1980: 165). Picasso “drew on the entire repertoire of
pictorial intervention he had used in his work to express anger, despair, violence,
and dementia” (Daix 1994: 250).

The situation – the monstrous atrocities committed by the fascist state – had a
profound effect on the artist. In May 1937, while working feverishly on Guernica,

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Picasso – the Spanish painter and thinker, who would never return to his native land
– issued the first political statement of his life:

The war in Spain is a war of reaction – against the people, against liberty. My
whole life as an artist has been a continual struggle against reaction, and against
the death of art. In the picture I’m now painting – which I shall call Guernica –
and in all of my recent work, I am expressing my horror of the military caste
which is now plunging Spain into an ocean of misery and death.
Pierre Daix 1994: 251

The letter, like Guernica itself, is a principled, courageous act. In his important study
of Picasso, Pierre Daix comments on the statement and describes the immediate
context in which it was produced:

Each word counts. The statement is a reply to General Millán Astray, who a
short time before at the University of Salamanca, while pointing a revolver at the
Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamu, had shouted, “Abajo la
inteligencia! Viva la muerte!” (Down with intelligence! Long live death!)
Pierre Daix 1994: 251

I have stood in front of Guernica. It is a large, mural-size work – 3.49 metres tall,
7.76 metres wide. Painted in muted tones of black, white and grey, the tragic scene
– suffering, death, barbarism – confronts the viewer in the face. The viewer is pulled
into the scene. It is impossible to look away. This, certainly, was my experience.

This Movement is about photographic artworks that, like Guernica, confront the
question: What is going on – here, now – in this place, my native land? And what, as
an artist, can I do about it?

I focus primarily on the work of a single contemporary visual artist – as John Berger
often does in his critical essays. This contemporary artist, Manit Sriwanichpoom, who
is from Thailand, appropriates photography to provide a powerful, witty critique of
consumerism as a way of life – via a character he invented and named ‘Mr Pink’.

To facilitate understanding of Manit Sriwanichpoom’s intervention, I briefly compare

his work to other attempts to engage in photographic practice as cultural critique: (1)
Lisette Model’s satirical, neo-Marxist photographic representations of European and
White American members of the bourgeoisie in the 1930s and 40s; and (2) to the
long-established tradition of ‘concerned photography’. I address questions of
assumptions made within these varying traditions regarding the photograph and the
viewer-spectator. Finally, I return to the hope-pessimism dilemma – a theme
developed in the previous Movement.

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Mr Pink

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Pink Man Begins #5, 1997. Used by permission of the artist.

Traditionally, a pink man is a symbol of the eternally unsatisfied and self-

centered consumer, a symbol of capitalism. Started as a performance, the pink
man and his empty pink supermarket cart, are a symbol of ubiquitous
consumption against the backdrop of contemporary Thailand. Beyond the
obvious entertainment, the cart carries actual questions about progress and what
consumerism means in newly developed Asian countries
http://publicdelivery.org/freedom/; accessed 24th February 2015.

Manit Sriwanichpoom is Thailand’s most renowned contemporary photographer: his

work is shown all over the world, principally, in leading galleries in Western
metropolises. He is owner of Kathmandu Photo Gallery, an important space for
contemporary art, discussion and debate; and also the leading curator of work by
Thai photographers, past and present (Sriwanichpoom 2015 and 2010). He is also a
writer – social observer, cultural critic – and a filmmaker. His work – street
photography and portraiture – is profoundly and willfully political; as an artist, he is
neither shy nor clandestine.1

Sriwanichpoom’s provocative ‘Mr Pink’ character (played by Sompong Thawee)

helps us to engage with important issues of our times – in Bangkok, Thailand,
Southeast Asia, wherever we are in the contemporary, globalised world – using
parody, satire, derision and wit. This is art – postmodernist photography, arranged
and staged – but it is art that matters.

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In Thai Photography Now, an exhibition catalogue for a 2010 exhibition in Tokyo,
which featured the work of thirteen contemporary Thai photographers, the editor,
writing in the third-person, says:

The portly man in a shocking-pink suit with his matching shopping cart first
appeared on the financial sector street of Silom in 1997, two months before the
“tom yam goong” financial crisis. Since then “Pink Man” has become Thailand’s
leading contemporary photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Protagonist. He has
appeared in several stories and situations to critique… consumerism, political
capitalism, tourism and terrorism in Thailand and all over Asia and Europe. Pink
Man has become an icon of consumerism that has left an indelible impression on
anyone who has seen him.
Manit Sriwanichpoom 2010: 33

Overweight, self-obsessed and dressed in a fluorescent-pink silk suit – with matching

shoes and shopping trolley – Mr Pink strolls around the city in search of things that
he might consume. Except for the blank look on his face, his self-presentation is
immaculate. I imagine that his hair has recently been done – and his nails, hands
and feet attended to – in one of those salons that seem to be everywhere in
Bangkok. I imagine that when he returns home in the evening, he parks the trolley by
his front door – leaving it there so as to ensure that he never leaves home without it.
He must guard against the possibility that he might miss an opportunity to
gluttonously attend to his perceived needs.

Tasteless, vulgar, insatiable – the face of crude materialism is readily apparent to the
viewer. The man in the hot pink suit is the incarnation of the phrase ‘Shop until you
drop!’ At home in Thailand, abroad in Western Europe, wherever he is, Mr Pink is
the ultimate, hyper-materialist consumer; he is the quintessential embodiment of
selfish greed. His portly body shape suggests that, for an extended period, he has
been consuming – eating, drinking, spending – too much.

The Mr Pink visual dramas initially developed as critical, creative commentary on the
changing face of Bangkok – ‘urban regeneration’, ‘progress’ – and the new modes of
subjectivity that emerged as a result. Writing on his website, Manit Sriwanichpoom
describes how the first in a series of ‘Pink Man’ performances, Pink Man Begins
(1997), was born. And he also reflects on the kinds of questions posed by the work:

The idea of Pink Man came to me when I went out shopping at the newest mall
in town. This mall is very big – like a factory – so bright with thousands of
fluorescent lamps, all kinds of goods kept on shelves orderly. A lot of buyers
were tirelessly enjoying filling their trolleys with goods, getting into long queues
to pay – like going to an amusement park. To what extent has consumerism
brainwashed us?
http://www.rama9art.org/manit_s/; accessed 27th February 2016

Like Picasso’s Guernica, the birth of Pink Man was triggered by events that occurred
in the artist’s homeland. Sriwanichpoom had already been politicised in his youth in
reaction to the war of the Vietnamese people against USA aggression – and to the
Americanisation of Thailand that began to occur as a direct result of that war in a
neighbouring land. But the proximate cause of Pink Man is, firstly, the massive urban

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regeneration that was going on in Thailand in the 1980s and 90s and, secondly, the
changes in modes of subjectivity and experiences of everyday life that came about
as a result of this transformation in the physical space of the city.

The artist continues:

Pink Man is my upset and alienated feeling towards the concept of consumerism
which has been accepted simply and without consideration by Thai society. I feel
that this system has enslaved us without our realization. Moreover, we are being
forced to act in the same way: there is a move towards uniformity. Pink Man is
wandering quietly and smilelessly, like a robot, in the opulent and busy business
area of Silom street, where there is a lunch market named La-lai-sap (melting
money) for office men and women. Pink, like in the photo, is considered
generally by high class groups of Thai people as tastelessness and vulgarity…
In addition to this reason, I intentionally use Pink color in order to subvert the
aesthetics of local art.
http://www.rama9art.org/manit_s/; accessed 27th February 2016

In autumn 2015, I visited Bangkok for the first time. I was impressed – a lot. I was
very attracted to the contemporary architecture – the curved buildings, the glass and
steel, the open spaces inside. I felt comfortable using the skytrain: unlike the ride on
a motorcycle taxi that terrified me, the skytrain felt familiar and safe – like the public
transport I have taken in other great metropolises. I like the hotel I stayed in – with its
curved dark glass and twenty-two floors. I was fascinated by a huge commercial
gallery of contemporary art that held 10,000 artworks. I liked the fact that, in the
evenings, for an extraordinarily reasonable price, I could eat beautifully prepared
Thai food, without have to leave my hotel. I loved the fact that, in addition to all of
that, there were still thousands of small Thai businesses on the streets – small
shops, cafés, hairdressers, masseuses… I was attracted by the bright, multicoloured
neon lights that transform the city after dark. I was impressed to find that there are so
many people from around the world living in Bangkok; it is a cosmopolitan city.2
Above all, I loved the kindness and politeness of the people – both male and female
– which was the first thing that I noticed.3

Through my Western eyes, Bangkok is a very interesting fusion of global and local
and East and West. I have been telling friends and family that, though it is a rather
long journey, the trip is absolutely worth it.

But I am not from Bangkok. It is not my place that has been bulldozed…

Much of what I find exciting about Bangkok troubles – even horrifies – Manit
Sriwanichpoom, whose home it is. The ‘Pink Man’ performances and photographs
are a response to this new Bangkok and the forces of globalisation – transnational
capitalism, Western culture, Americanisation – that produced it.

Pink Man is an artistic-political reaction to the production of sameness. One day, as I

was riding in a taxi through a central area of Bangkok, I was struck by a multi-storey,
cylindrically-shaped building. I was drawn to the absolutely contemporary
architectural form. But, then, perhaps within only a minute or two, I saw another
building that looked exactly like it. Before I left, I think I saw a few more… What

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appeared to be unique, was not. I suspect I will find the same building on a visit to
some other city – perhaps in Hong Kong, perhaps in Berlin, perhaps in San
Francisco… Even I, the global tourist, do not like this.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford, the Father of Fordism, is said to have said to the American
public: “You can have a Model T Ford in any color you like, as long as it is black.”
Sriwanichpoom regards this kind of cultural production – with its absolute
commitment to efficiency, profit and sameness – as abhorrent.

Pink Man is a response to consumption – or, rather, to consumerism, the superficial

obsession with having rather being. He seems particularly concerned by the fact that
American forms of consumption are so prevalent in the city: Mr Pink is photographed
outside of McDonald’s and KFC (formerly, Kentucky Fried Chicken). The artist reads
the obsession with money and things as vulgarity. Pink Man contests this state of
affairs – which could not be further away from the Buddhist roots of his family, his
community, his homeland. The artwork cries out for a world where human beings are
not measured by the things they possess.

Note that Sriwanichpoom reads the obsession with things – this hyper-materialism –
as a kind of psychological and cultural enslavement, as the following passage,
quoted in a blog posted in April 2010 by Isabello Lofgren, makes clear:

Pink Man is my upset and alienated feeling towards the concept of consumerism
which has been accepted simply and without consideration by Thai society. I feel
that this system has enslaved us without our realization. Moreover, we are being
forced to act in the same way: there is a move towards uniformity.
quoted in https://isabellofgren.wordpress.com; accessed 5th March 2016
4

The argument recalls that of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and revolutionary, who
argued – both in his reflections on the French Caribbean (in Black Skin, White
Masks) and on Algerian society and culture (in The Wretched of the Earth), that the
most insidious effects of colonialism are the effects on the mind – individual and
collective, conscious and unconscious – of the colonised. It follows from this that
liberation from cultural dominance requires, as Fanon would put it, ‘decolonising the
mind’.

Pink Man is protest against the decline of community – social ties, bonds between
people, neighbourliness – and, concomitantly, the rise of individualism. It is a cry
against the emergence of new modes of subjectivity – new modes of seeing and
feeling, doing and being – which the artist sees as a reduction of humanity to
anonymity and robotic behaviour.

Pink Man is an expression of reaction to a turning away from core Thai-Buddhist

values and moral principles – like the admonition to move beyond attachment to
material possessions in this world, like the moral imperative to strive for enlightened
understanding and behaviour. As the embodiments of moral values, ‘Pink Man’ and
‘Buddhist monk’ are polar opposites: the subject positions that they respectively
occupy could not be more different; the moral values that they respectively embody
are incommensurate.

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Pink Man is the result of the artist’s feelings of alienation and anger towards the
place that is home. He has spent much of his professional life producing work that
reflects, critically, on contemporary Bangkok – frequently via projects done in
collaboration with his partner Ing K, the radical filmmaker, who often contributes as
writer, editor and/or translator:5

It was the horrors of fascism and the Spanish Civil War that so immediately and
profoundly affected Picasso that he produced Guernica (1937). Manit
Sriwanichpoom was first politicised in reaction to the Vietnam War – which was in
the neighbouring nation of Vietnam and had a profound effect on life in Bangkok and
Thailand. But it was the radical – some would say, ‘thoughtless’ – remaking of
Bangkok and its people through globalisation and urban regeneration that produced
Pink Man (originally in 1997).

Glenn Jordan, Shoppers in the New, Improved Bangkok, Siam Paragon Shopping Centre, October
2015.

In the little pink book, Manit Sriwanichpoom: Visual Artist (2002), Rutger Pontzen,
the Dutch art critic, says:

[T]he fusion of new construction with old buildings produced a completely new
kind of urban environment. Streets were widened whilst the building lines of
existing residential blocks went unchanged. New shopping malls shot up like
mushrooms in green countryside areas.

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 Over ten years, a spider’s web of highways and a network of skytrains were built,
like an alien presence that was spread over the city. Bangkok turned into a
hybrid labyrinth without a clear layout or plan, without centre or structure.
Rutger Pontzen 2002: 7

Pontzen was writing in 2002. Bangkok has been transformed even more since then.
And Manit Sriwanichpoom continues as a cultural critic of the changing city – with its
structures and relations of inequality and marginalisation, with its new kinds of
persons exhibiting ultramodern modes of subjectivity.6

Consider the photograph I took in autumn 2015 of three young people sitting
together in a café in the Siam Paragon Shopping Centre in Bangkok.

Glenn Jordan, Friends at Cupcake Love Café, Siam Paragon Shopping Centre, Bangkok, 2015.

While in Bangkok in October 2015, I told a friend that I wanted to pay a visit to one of
Bangkok’s shopping centre. Sasinee [sp?] suggested the Siam Paragon Shopping
Centre, which was a short skytrain journey from my hotel. After spending perhaps an
hour walking, looking and taking photographs with my little Lumix camera, I sat down
in a café. Near me was a group of three or four young people, who were obviously
relatives or friends (they had a baby with them). As I observed them, I suddenly
realised that, despite being at a small table – in an intimate space – they were
engaged with their mobile phones, not with each other. Occasionally, one of them
would say something and another would respond or laugh, but at least ninety
percent of the time, they were engaged with their phones – so engaged that they did
not even notice me as I took several pictures of them. They are together but

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profoundly separate – each in his/her own (digital) world. They are the new Thai
subjects…

Barbara Kruger, [DETAILS],

The shopping mall is the new city street, the new urban square – but with a
difference. The shopping mall is the contemporary, vibrant space – safe and open to
all – of chance encounters between people of different social and cultural
backgrounds, where strangers rub shoulders as they look, shop, eat, drink and
perform for gazing eyes. It is the space of little, everyday rituals in open-plan cafés
where lost souls and social misfits sit in anonymity – and where, thanks to wifi, the
visitor can engage with the world outside, while s/he can freely choose to ignore the
world that s/he is inhabiting.

It is a space of freedom – the freedom to shop until you drop. It is also a space of
profound alienation – where even friends sitting together feel no pressure to affirm
each other’s existence.

It is an appropriate place for the critical artist to study new modes of subjectivity.

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Shopping with Corpses

Manit Sriwanichpoom, Horror in Pink #1 (6 October 1976 Rightwing Fanatics' Massacre of Democracy
Protestors), 2001. Used by permission of the artist.

Somebody enquires: are you still a Marxist? Never before has the devastation
caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive
than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed
Marx who prophesied and analyzed the devastation?
John Berger 2007X: 113

Mr Pink – the face of contemporary obsession with consumption – is omnipresent. In

addition to being a symbol of crass, gluttonous materialism, he also represents
political apathy. While injustice, oppression and horror surround him, he continues to
stroll and pose – in his garish silk suit, with matching shoes and shopping trolley.

When Mr Pink finds himself in a scene surrounded by the victims of a rightwing

massacre of democracy protestors, he turns and poses for the camera. If someone
is required to pose with corpses – with ‘collateral damage’, torture victims, recipients
of unspeakable acts of violence – Mr Pink is the best man for the job. He is there –
posing, turning his best side toward the camera, smiling.

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 Manit Swiwanichpoom, Horror in Pink #5. Used by permission of the artist.

I feel relieved in my certainty that Mr Pink is an aberration – that nobody else is like
him. Regrettably, I am wrong.

There is an endless supply of him being produced. Like the seemingly unending
assembly line that produced Model T Fords in Detroit in the 1920s and 30s – each
one painted black and exactly the same as the next – there are more and more and
more Mr Pinks…

Look closely. You will have had occasion to meet the main character in this visual
drama. Perhaps he is with you each time that you look in the mirror.

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 Manit Sriwanichpoom, 15 Pieces of Pink Man-Icon of Consumerism, sculpture at Paris Art Fair, 2014.
Photograqpher: [NAME]. Used by permission of the artist.

There is a final point that I must make here. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Mr Pink
photographs are sharp cultural-political critique – with consumption/over-
consumption being a key theme. It is ironic, then, that limited edition prints of these
artworks sell for thousands of dollars on the international market – in London, Paris,
Tokyo and elsewhere.

And, meanwhile, one of my sisters owns 500 pairs of shoes…

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Against the Grain: Photography as Cultural Critique

Lisette Model, Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York City, c. 1946.

Like politically engaged critical writing, critical photographic practice addresses the
question posed some years ago by the soul singer Marvin Gaye: What’s going on?
That is: What is happening – right here, right now, in the present conjuncture? What
is occurring in our society, our culture, our politics, our selves?

And the dissident artist asks: What role can/might/should art play in combatting
structures and practices of oppression, marginalisation and inequality?

The Mr Pink interventions employ postmodernist photographic art – together with

performance art – to offer a scathing, satirical critique of crass materialism in
contemporary Bangkok. The ‘Mr Pink’ character, developed by Manit Sriwanichpoom
and played by his friend and colleague Sompong Thawee, is well suited for the job.
This is witty and effective cultural criticism – using visual imagery, without words, as
the medium.

Mr Pink is a contemporary contribution to a long tradition of photographic practice

that offers biting cultural critique of ways of living in the city. Think of early work like
Lisette Model’s photographs in the 1930’s and 1940s of bourgeois and petty-
bourgeois people on the streets of New York and on Coney Island beach, and, also,
in San Francisco and Nice.7

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 Lisette Model, Promenade des Anglais, Nice, 1938

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 Lisette Model, Woman with Veil, San Francisco, 1949

Lisette Model (1901-1983) was born into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. She
initially intended to become a musician – studying piano and musical theory in
Vienna (with Arnold Schönberg in 1920-21) before moving to Paris in 1926 to study
singing. After years of formal musical study, she turned to painting – and then, by
1933 – to photography. During the early years of the Second World War, she left
France for New York, where she became a member of Photo League.8 The Photo
League was a not-for-profit organisation of politically engaged photographers – men
and women – who, working within a humanist documentary tradition, photographed
on the streets of New York (see Daiter 2001).9 The Photo League had a school, a
gallery and a publication.

The League, which was open to all, provided a democratic forum for dialogue
and education. Shared darkrooms and exhibition spaces offered members
affordable means to pursue their art as well as gain exposure at a time, with few
exceptions, that predated photography’s acceptance in museums and galleries.
Catherine Evans 2010: 5

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The League was founded in 1936 – the same year as the launch of the Farm
Security Administration (FSA) under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
Administration – and some League members were also part of the FSA. Their
contribution was substantial; their demise is a sad commentary on anti-communist
delirium in the Land of the Free.

By its demise hundreds of photographers had passed through its doors.

Members were both amateur and professional photographers committed to the
transformative power of photography in effecting social changes. “Upon the
photographer,” they proclaimed, “rests the responsibility and duty of recording a
true image of the world as it is today.” The League was the heart and soul of
social documentary photography until McCarthy-era hysteria forced its closing in
1951. The fallout from Cold War paranoia had ruinous and lasting consequences
for many of its members.
Catherine Evans 2010: 4-5

Photographs by members of the Photo League “confront the devastating effect of

urban poverty and social injustice” (Evans 2010: 5). They are empathetic towards
Black people and the poor (see, e.g., Palfi 1973 and Siskind 1991) – while often
being critical of prevailing tendencies in American society and culture.

Most of the League members were leftwing children of European Jewish immigrants;
some were communist.10 They paid heavy prices for their political stances (real and
assumed) – not least because, during the McCarthy era in the Land of the Free, it
was widely assumed that Jewish intellectuals, activists and artists were very likely to
be Communists. In the minds of the redbaiters, ‘Jew’ and ‘Communist’ were virtually
synonyms.

By the time Lisette Model moved to New York, she had already produced socially
engaged work that would come to be a significant contribution to 20th century
photography. Elisabeth Sussman notes:

In the summer of 1934, she went to stay with her mother in Nice. Near her
mother’s house, she portrayed the rich visitors – French, German, Russian –
who went there to sunbathe and rest. Model’s is not a flattering study of a
healthy, gymnastic beach culture, the type of utopian vision promulgated
between the wars. Her wealthy subjects are not young, beautiful and fit; they are
the antithesis of grace and elegance. The South of France’s unforgiving sun
glares on their bulky bodies, which their clothes strain to cover. These
photographs have come to be regarded as presenting a damning view of
indolent middle-class Europeans. They form a collective portrait of people who,
in their privileged state of lazy unmindfulness, were responsible for the imminent
collapse of their world.
Elisabeth Sussman 2001: 5

Some of the photographs from Lisette Model’s Promenade des Anglais series were
published in 1935 in the French magazine Regards (which was a communist
publication at that time). The pictures were accompanied by written text that critiqued
the subjects’ bourgeois lifestyle.

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Lisette Model’s critical, satirical eye did not lessen after her move to the USA. In
1949, in San Francisco, she produced Woman with a Veil, one of her most famous
photographs. It is a deeply unsympathetic portrayal of a bourgeois woman.11

Lisette Model, like Manit Sriwanichpoom, appropriates the camera not simply as an
instrument for making artwork, but as a weapon for lampooning bourgeois ways of
life – as well as exposing practices of inequality, injustice and marginalisation. In
terms of subject matter and mode of representation, many of Lisette Model’s
photographs of persons from the middle and upper classes bear more than passing
resemblance to Manit Sriwanichpoom’s photographs of the portly Thai man in the
flashy, hot-pink suit. Both photographs employ photography to satirically engage in
cultural criticism of particular lifestyles or ways of being in the world.

Concerned Photography

W. Eugene Smith, Tomoko in Her Bath, 1971.

Generations of photographers have engaged in creative practice that sides with the
‘underdog’. One photographic tradition, in particular, has continuously focused on the
plight of the oppressed, marginalised and excluded – including victims of war,
tyranny and famine. That tradition is known as humanist documentary or humanist
reportage photography.

Consider Tomoko in Her Bath (1971), a photograph by W. Eugene Smith, the

acclaimed American photographer. This picture depicts a mother (Ryoko Uemura), in
the Japanese city of Minamata, cradling her mercury-poisoned daughter in a
traditional Japanese bathing chamber. The picture, which became world famous,
was partially staged – the mother agreed to give the child her bath at just this time of
day, when the light was perfect for maximum effect – but the story it sought to bring

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to the world’s attention was real: children were dying in the village as a result of
mercury poisoning, due to an act of corporate irresponsibility.

Tomoko in Her Bath is rich in symbolism, another humanist photograph with the
tragic theme of the mother and the suffering or dying child. But it is also a document
– a powerful document – about a real, human condition. W. Eugene Smith was a
committed photographer. After hearing of the tragedy at Minamata – the chronic
poisoning and permanent deformation of local people, including children in the
womb, by alkyl mercury compounds from industrial waste – the photographer and his
wife spent nearly three years (1971-73) living and photographing there.

W. Eugene Smith cared. He is ‘concerned photographer’ who wanted his

photographic practice to challenge apathy and make a difference. Perhaps this is
why he is particularly interesting to John Berger, who wrote about his work on more
than one occasion (see Berger 2013c and 2013X).

The accepted view of ‘concerned photography’ – the term was coined by Cornel
Capa, Robert Capa’s brother – is that it is compassionate, humanist photography in
the social documentary or reportage tradition. Reformist in orientation, it seeks to
accomplish progressive social change by transforming the hearts and minds of
viewers. For W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, Gordon Parks, Mary
Ellen Mark and many other ‘concerned photographers’, there is a moral imperative
for the photographer to intervene in the world: the camera is used as a weapon in
the struggle to combat injustice and oppression (see Capa 1968 and 1972).

While strongly committed to realism, many photographers working in the humanist

tradition produce works that echo romanticist aesthetics – but very often while
exploring profound human tragedy. W. Eugene Smith’s Tomoko in Her Bath is an
obvious example – as are some of Sebastiao Salgado’s photographs of women in
African refugee camps in the 1980s.

  19  
 
 Salgado, Children's Ward in the Korem Refugee Camp, Ethiopia, 1984.

Consider this Salgado photograph of a mother and child in a refugee camp in

Ethiopia. The picture employs a romanticist mode of representation and echoes a
romanticist theme – that of the Madonna and child; that of the loving, noble Madonna
facing pain, suffering, tragedy. But I want to suggest that this photograph is as much
realist as it is romanticist. It was taken in Ethiopia in 1984, during a horrific famine.
Its aesthetics are the product of accident – the light hits just there at just this
moment; the mother’s head and eyes bend towards the light, the child, lit from
behind, suckles at the mother’s breast – and the photographer’s eye. The scene was
not stage directed by Salgado.

The intent of such environmental portraiture – whose aesthetics combine beauty with
horror – is to engage the viewer-spectator and transform her/his way of thinking,
feeling and doing.

  20  
 
Beyond ‘Concerned Photography’

Re: Bert Hardy – photo in Cardiff city centre with women in fur coats, etc. and Black window cleaner –
part of Cardiff: A Divided City series (Picture Post, [Mth], 1954)

Consider this reportage photograph taken in 1954 in Cardiff’s high street by Bert
Hardy, the legendary photographer at Britain’s Picture Post magazine.12 Taken for a
feature article entitled ‘Cardiff: A Divided City’, the theme of the image is class and
racial division in the capital city of Wales. The photograph works to debunk the myth
of Cardiff as a mecca of tolerance and respect for difference – a story that local
politicians, media and the general public often tell. It is a good example of
‘concerned photography’ – documentary, realist, humanist, anti-racist, siding with the
‘underdog’.

This photograph is the last in a series of, as I recall from my visit to the Picture Post
archives, four or five. It is the photograph when the young man looks up and sees
the photographer – when their gazes meet.

If you look closely, the class differences – between haves and have-nots – become
apparent. On the one hand, there are the well -to-do White women – consumers, in
their fine winter coats. On the other hand, there alone is a young Black man – an
immigrant (perhaps from a recently-arrived West Indian family) or, as it is now put, a
‘guest worker’ (a Merchant Navy seaman from the colonies). We know that he is not
Cardiff-born because although there was a presence of Black Merchant Navy men in
Cardiff from the latter decades of the 19th century, there were no Black women (as

  21  
 
distinct from ‘Mixed-Race’ women) living in Cardiff at the time of this young man’s
birth.

Look down by the young man’s feet at the bottom of the frame. A bucket is visible
there. The young Other is a manual worker – perhaps, a window cleaner – in a world
that is not his own.

The photograph invites the viewer to feel empathy towards the young man and to
adopt a critical stance towards the well-to-do women. This is a critical intervention –
a mode of humanist reportage photographic practice – that seeks to make a
difference.

This work – especially, apparently, its cultural politics – seems to have strong
affinities with Sriwanichpoom’s Mr Pink series. But, actually, there are considerable
differences. These differences have mainly to do with the fact that whereas Bert
Hardy’s ‘Divided City’ photograph belongs to genre called humanist reportage
photography, the Mr Pink series belongs to postmodernist visual art. The key
differences can be shown if we consider:

1. The question of the photograph: What is it? How does it work?

2. The question of the human figure. Does the figurative still have a place in the
work of art? What role might it play today (after modernism)?

3. The question of the viewer-spectator: How is s/he be conceived? How does

the photograph address her/him?

4. The question of hope: Are there grounds for us to be optimistic about

photography making a difference, helping to bring about a better world?

The Photograph

Humanist reportage photography is often referred to as ‘documentary photography’.

This is somewhat misleading because humanist photographers – such as Henri
Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Mary Ellen Mark, Sebastiao Salgado and Bert
Hardy – always understood that their photographs included a subjectivity element,
that their photographs were not simply a window through which a viewer could see
reality in the world. Nonetheless, these photographers do tend to view their
photographs as, above all else, evidence of things that are going on in the world – as
representations of connotative, if not denotative truths.

In the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and other countries, there was a revolt against the
notion of photographs as documents.13 Photographers – including a number of
feminist photographers – strongly rejected the notion that the documentary
photograph is a window on to the world, that it can represent some kind of truth. But,
in this regard, they did not go as far as modernist art practice. Consider the following
passage, which was written by Victor Burgin to accompany the reprinting of his
important essay ‘Art, Common Sense and Photography’ (originally published in 1976
in Camerwork, a UK journal of contemporary photographic theory and practice):

  22  
 
 I wrote ‘Art Common Sense and Photography’ at the request of Jo Spence… My
essay and Jo Spence’s request were responses to the glacial situation of
politically interested photography practice and theory in the mid-1970s. The
‘theory’ we wished to bring bear on this, and other photographic practices
(especially advertising), took place in the gulf between the then prevailing
sociologistic and aestheticist attitudes. For aestheticism, the photograph was the
occasion for ‘purely visual’ pleasures, to which considerations of context were
largely irrelevant. For sociologism, the photograph was a window on the world, a
transparent means of access to the truth of an experience, to which formal
considerations were entirely secondary.
Victor Burgin 1997 (orig. 1976): 74

Influenced by semiotics and Marxism, and, then, by poststructuralist and

postmodernist theory and cultural practice, many photographers both in the UK and
elsewhere came to the view that the photograph is always-already a construction – a
mode of representation, a text that requires interpretive reading, a manifestation of
ideology. Unlike earlier photographers who seemed unaware that they were in the
construction business, these new cultural workers committed themselves to making
– as distinct from taking – photographs.

Their artworks are sometimes referred to as staged photography or ‘constructed

realities’ (Köhler 1995; also see Bright 2006 and Campany 2012). Whether the work
is produced in the studio, a domestic space or on the street, the role of these
photographers is analogous to that of the film or theatre director: working with live
models and/or props, the photographer pre-arranges the scene, deliberately
constructing a fictional reality.

Moreover, like earlier generations of photomontage artists (e.g., John Heartfield),

they appropriate – often, rephotograph – the ‘documentary photographs’ of earlier
generations of photographers not for their truth-value, but as material for artistic
expression. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Mr Pink series has affinities with this approach [.
Sriwanichpoom inserts his model into the documentary photograph – into its space –
positioning him within scenes of unspeakable violence, among the brutalised, the
tortured, the murdered.

The Human Figure

  23  
 
 Joy Gregory, Autoportraits, [DETAILS], 1990

Unlike the modernist revolt against realism – which turned away from the figurative
and radically privileged abstraction (i.e., shape, line, colour, texture, etc.) – the
postmodernist revolt includes a return to the figurative. Indeed, often the human
body – sometimes, that of the artist herself/himself – is central. However, the
subjects represented in this artwork are not shown as having identities or
subjectivities that are unified, fixed, completed or known. Rather, they are shown as:

• having plural identities, fragmented or ruptured subjectivities – e.g., Joy

Gregory’s Autoportraits, 1990 (Gregory 1995; also see Hall and Sealy 2001:
57-58 and 132-134);

• occupying multiple subject positions – e.g., Cindy Sherman’s ‘self-portraits’ in

which, with the aid of makeup, wigs, props and lighting, she assumes
numerous subject positions from teenage girl to film noir actress (Cruz, Smith
and Jones 1997) or Maxine Walker “‘on stage’ in a variety of disguises,
challenging preconceived notions of black feminine identity” (Hall and Sealy
2001: 56; also see Walker 1999);

• possessing shifting, emergent, uncertain, unstable, illusive or unknowable

identities – e.g., Joy Gregory’s Autoportraits, Lee Friedlander’s self-portraits in
which the photographer appears as a shadowy figure on the pavement, on
buildings, on the backs of pedestrians (Friedlander 2005), or my self-portrait
taken in and through the window of a Bangkok hotel.

  24  
 
 Glenn Jordan, Self-portrait with Black Podium, 22nd Floor, S31 Hotel, Bangkok, 2015

When the photographer is the subject of the photograph, s/he tends to be decentred
and represented in an unflattering way. An interesting example is a series of self-
portraits by John Coplans, the British artist, writer and museum director: see, e.g.,
his Self-portrait: Hands Spread on Knees, 1985 and his Self-portrait: Feet Frontal,
1984 (Coplans 1997).

In the work of a number of artists – including, most obviously, Cindy Sherman –

identity is represented as performance – as something we do, rather than something
we are. ‘Mr Pink’ performs identity. We never see beyond the masquerade. Perhaps
the masquerade is all that there is…

Whereas earlier traditions of portraiture (e.g., humanist, romanticist and realist

photographic portraiture) sought to reveal something ‘deep’ about the sitter, to
provide a ‘window into the soul’, postmodernist portraiture is content to remain at the
surface.

The Viewer and Subjectivity

I want to suggest that how the viewer-spectator is conceived and how s/he is
addressed is very different in postmodern photography as compared to ‘concerned
photography’ and other humanist traditions of photographic practice. How, then, as
regards the viewer, does concerned photography work?

Firstly, ‘concerned photography’, like other humanist photography, relies for its
effects on empathy. I am drawn to the photograph because something about it – the
expression on the subject’s face, the apparent tragic situation, the aesthetic beauty

  25  
 
of the image contrasting with the horror of the situation – draws me to it. I feel a kind
of bond with the subjects in the image, even though I am from another class, another
culture, another race. It is the representation of the human condition – those
similarities of human experience that override individual and group difference – that
draws me. I, too, am a parent and, although I have never lived in a refugee camp, I
can almost feel that mother’s pain. I, too, have felt isolated and lonely, if only for
short periods, thus I feel a certain amount of compassion towards that young Black
man in a sea of whiteness.

Secondly, ‘concerned photography’, like other humanist photography, relies for its
effects on a certain conception of human consciousness. This photographic tradition
assumes that people are basically rational – and thus that much of the oppression
and horror in the world is due to lack of good, reliable information. A central task of
the photographer is therefore one of showing the viewer ‘what it is really like’ to live
in the slums, on the other side of the tracks – or, today, in the age of mobile phones,
to record what often happens to young Black males in encounters with policemen in
the USA.

The assumption is that practices of oppression and injustice are often due to a
knowledge problem: if people knew better, they would do better; they would act to re-
form society. It is a view – a reformist view – that the way to change the world is to
change the way people think – to challenge prejudices, myth, ideology with ‘facts’,
‘truth’, ‘evidence’. Confronted with evidence, human beings, who are basically ‘good
chaps’, will think and do otherwise – or so this tradition assumes.

Thus, the humanist photograph, if it is to be effective, interpellates the viewer-

spectator through feelings, emotion, affect – but only as a way of hooking me in, of
getting me to stop, focus and pay attention. Once the photograph has got my
attention, I am supplied with information – about the war that is going on, about the
famine, about the housing situation for the poor… It is no accident that ‘concerned
photographers’ tend to be photojournalists, not art photographers.14

The ‘concerned photography’ tradition assumes a kind of Cartesian subject.

Although the emotional side of this subject is more important for the humanist
photographer than it is for the strict Cartesian, there is still the assumption of
separation between mind and body and of human beings as rational creatures.
(Descartes said, “I think, therefore, I am”.) It is a view of consciousness as privileged
over the non-conscious. (The Freudians and their followers, but not contemporary
psychologists, would say the ‘unconscious’.)

Today, in the postmodern age – after the impact of structuralist, feminist and
postmodernist theory – this view of human beings has declined. Thus, contemporary
visual artists, including photographers, tend to view the spectator-viewer as
engaging with images largely through feelings, emotions, affect. They also do not
assume that the viewer-spectator has a unified identity or subjectivity.

Consider the Mr Pink photographs in light of the above. I am a viewer-spectator

attending an exhibition where I encounter a large photograph of Mr Pink pushing his
shopping cart through the streets of Bangkok – perhaps past MacDonald’s. As I look

  26  
 
at the image, I smile a little. Perhaps my smile is because I find the pink suit
humorous.

Perhaps it is because I feel a sense of recognition. I have seen this guy before. I feel
a sense of familiarity because I know people who are obsessed with things. Perhaps,
it is because I feel/see myself when I look at ‘Mr Pink’: he is an exaggerated version
of myself. I am in the picture.

Later in the exhibition, I see another photograph with ‘Mr Pink’ as the central
character. This time, he is posing – pleased with himself – among a field of corpses.
My body recoils; I am repulsed. I feel no connection with this character whatsoever –
certainly, absolutely no empathy. I may find some pleasure in shopping, but I am not
that!

I now feel a profound dislike for ‘Mr Pink’, including the character walking the streets
who previously elicited my smile. The familiar has been made strange: the
meaning/feeling of the first photograph has changed. I begin to think critically about
my consumerist tendencies. Dissident photography has opened up a new subject
position for me – a place from which alternative, oppositional subjectivities and
identities can be produced and supported. Note that this change in my
feeling/thinking – the development of my critical sensitivities – has occurred not
because of empathy, but because of its opposite.

My feelings are split: I am attracted to ‘Mr Pink’; I am repulsed by him. I am him; I am

not-him. My feelings are split. I am pulled in different ways. I am a contradictory
subject. The Mr Pink photographs have addressed me as a subject that desires; as a
subject with competing feelings and thoughts. In his classic work, The Souls of Black
Folk (1989; orig. 1903), W. E. B. DuBois says of African American subjectivity:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of
the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness – an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W. E. B. DuBois 1989 (orig. 1903), 5

Although written more than a hundred years ago, this kind of conception of
subjectivity is consistent with contemporary thinking – except the argument is that
this notion of the self – as split, contradictory, at war with itself – is not the private
domain of African Americans but the experience of people of many varying
backgrounds who live today in conditions of postmodernity.

  27  
 
Hope

From the age of Enlightenment until, perhaps, the early 1970s (i.e., just after the
failed revolts of 1968), those engaging in struggle against injustice could join Martin
Luther King Jr. in assuming that although “the arc of the moral universe is long” we
feel – or, perhaps, even know – “it bends towards justice.”15 Today – after so many
horrific atrocities beginning but hardly ending with the Holocaust, after so many failed
revolutions (most recently, the ‘Arab Spring’) – we can no longer have faith in
reason, hope for the future. As Berger puts it, “The future cannot be trusted” (Berger
2005: 95).

The concerned photographers assumed that the future could be trusted – that
confronted with indisputable evidence (documentary and reportage photographs) of
oppression, inequality, etc., human beings would change things for the better.
Today, in this post-modern age, there are still photographers – a great many of
them, including Manit Sriwanichpoom – who still struggle to counter myths,
stereotypes and ideology; to represent hidden histories and hidden presences; to
remove the gag from marginalised voices and stories; to subvert structures of power.

But, for the most part, neither they nor their audiences assume that ‘the universe
bends towards justice’. For us, as Professor Stuart Hall so often put it, the future is
‘without guarantees’, without certainties. There is always the possibility that the
response to our cultural-political interventions will be indifference – or even
increased barbarism…

Listen, again, to the artist:

I must admit that my vision of Thailand and this world does tend to be a
pessimistic one. It’s hard for me to believe in our bright future, as predicted by
the current government propaganda and various pundits, who are proclaiming
joyously that the Thai economy is passing out of crisis mode and, goody, we’re
going to get to play with soap bubbles again.
Manit Sriwanichpoom 2003: 6

Manit Sriwanichpoom wishes that he could be optimistic, but he cannot be. For him
as for John Berger, Stuart Hall and many other leftist intellectuals and artists who
have engaged in years of struggle, the best option is, as Antonio Gramsci put it,
‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’16

                                                                                                               
Notes
1
For a view of his portraiture work, see Sriwanichpoom (2006). Most of the
photographs in this book are close-up portraits – headshots – of subjects looking
directly at the viewer. These are not portraits of the rich, famous or powerful, but of
ordinary people that used to walk pass his studio. In this book, as in much of his
other work, the photographs make the unseen visible – in an intimate, powerful way.

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2
Here is a small example. At an exhibition opening at Manit Sriwanichpoom’s
gallery, which was attended by perhaps 150 people (it is a small space), there was
another African American there. Like me, he grew up in California, but he has been
living in the Far East for decades – in both Thailand and China.
3
My taxi ride from the Bangkok airport to my hotel – unfortunately, during the
evening rush hours – took more than an hour. Although the multiple lanes of traffic
often nearly came to a standstill, I did not hear a single car horn. A year earlier, I had
ridden around Cairo in taxis and private vehicles. Cairo had the same sort of traffic
problems as Bangkok – except there were blaring hours and drivers sticking their
heads out of the windows and screaming at each other. My experience in various
countries around the world is that traffic in Cairo is closer to the norm than that in
Bangkok. There are real cultural differences: in Thailand I experienced a level of
politeness and kindness that I have not experienced in any large city.
4
The direct link is: https://isabellofgren.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/thai-
contemporary-art-the-pink-man-manit-sriwanichpoom/; last accessed 5th March
2016.
5
Ing K (i.e., Ing Kanjanavanit) often contributes as a writer, editor and/or translator to
his various photographic projects. She and Sriwanichpoom collaborated on a Thai-
language feature-length film entitled Shakespeare Must Die (2012). Set in a fictional
country, the film tells the story of a theatre company trying to stage a production of
Macbeth. One of the main characters is a dictator who bears a certain resemblance
to a former Thai leader. The government banned the film – assuming, undoubtedly
correctly, that it was an unflattering representation of contemporary Thailand.
6
See, for example, Sriwanichpoom’s book Protest (Sriwanichpoom and Ing K 2003),
which consists of photographs taken – every Tuesday, beginning 9th April 2002, for a
year – of protestors outside of Government House in Bangkok. Some of the protests
were by organised groups, some were by individuals with varying complaints about
society and their everyday lives.

Also see Sriwanichpoom’s book of street photography: Bangkok in Black & White
(1999). The back cover reads:

Manit’s vision is darkly humorous, as Bangkok is, seen with the horror-struck
eyes of a child… Thailand is going through her worst crisis in living memory, and
Bangkok is her hysterical heart, giggling insanely as the world collapses.
7
Later, her student Diane Arbus would produce similar images, but her photographs
are less consistently political than Model’s. Moreover, some of her work seems
almost to be making fun of people who are visibly ‘abnormal’ in some way as a result
of mental illness or physical deformity.
8
Useful books on LIsette Model include Thomas (1990) and Sussman (2001) and
Model and Abbott (2007; orig. 1979). Also see Codrescu and Pitts (1995), which is
about seven European émigré photographers who came to the USA, fleeing fascism

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and war, during the 1930s and 40s: Alexander Alland, Robert Frank, John Gutmann,
Otto Hagel, Hansel Mieth, Lisette Model and Marion Palfi.
9
In addition to her involvement in the Photo League, Lisette Model was also part of
an informal group of photographers and designers associated with Alexey
Brodovitch, the Russian-born photographer, designer and teacher who was art
director of the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Brodovitch
facilitated the careers of a number of photographic artists who became important in
20th century photography.
10
Interestingly, one of the ways their work is now being read is as a part of the
Jewish contribution to art and culture in the USA (and elsewhere in the West). Thus,
for example, from November 2011 to March 2012, the Jewish Museum in New York
hosted an exhibition entitled The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-
1951. The exhibition displayed more than 140 works by Berenice Abbott, Sid
Grossman, Jerome Liebling, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, Weegee and
other members of the group.
11
Lisette Model’s contributions to photography are not limited to her work as a
photographer. She was a master teacher of photography, teaching at the New
School for Social Research from 1951 until she died in 1983. Her students included
a number people who became significant photographers – Diane Arbus, Larry Fink,
Rosalind Solomon, Bruce Weber, David Bruce Cratsley and others.
12
On Bert Hardy and Picture Post, see my Down the Bay (2001). There are several
important contributions by Tom Hopkinson, who edited Picture Post from 1940 to
1950: see, e.g., Hopkinson (1975) and Hopkinson (1970). Within the cultural studies
literature, the seminal contribution is Stuart Hall’s ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post’
(1972). An abridged version of this article is included in Jordan (2001).
13
This is often referred to as a revolt against realism. See Victor Burgin’s essay ‘Art,
Commonsense and Photography’ (Burgin 1997; orig. 1976) for a discussion of this
revolt in 1970s Britain.
14
Ironically, years after they appeared in newspapers and/or magazines, the
photographs of ‘concerned photographers’ often end up selling in the international
art market. Photographs by Salgado taken in African refugee camps are an obvious
case in point.
15
Martin Luther King Jr. said this during a commencement address delivered in 1964
at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
 
16  See Jordan 2014.

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