Let's open up a window
Where can we go to look?
Let’s take a look at Tavepong Pratoomwong’s pictures before I start. You should come to my position naturally if my preferences are to mean anything to you. Below are his best pictures (pictures he’s re-upload several times, and are featured in articles).
Do you feel anything? I mean what is extraordinary for me is how ordinary I feel. It was a surprise how little his photography moved me. Is it kitsch? Maybe, although this isn’t the sort of light observing, shallow subject matter, and cute priority that I would associate with that word. No, this is a supreme lack of—of—of—of commentary. Of impression. One just has to imagine the sort of wandering he is doing in order to take these shots. Dismal imagery comes to mind.
At times his camera is looking for lines that call you to an obvious object. A red arrow on a youtube thumbnail. Other times, with a cheeky grin, he is subverting the sizing of his subjects. Instances of his camera’s skywardly gaze are chillingly unironic.
“Isn’t it funny?” he asks, spurring you with his hands out to his side. “These two things next to each other? I just happened to be there, but it looks as if it’s the case all the time.” Yes, the monkeys butt fucking next to a sacrosanct Baba does call to mind the baseness of our animality in the face of our flitting spirituality—hokey, yes that’s the word I am looking for! Trite. Lacking class.
An artwork is not the manifest product of an artist’s vision. That’s either called a homework assignment or propaganda.
What classifies as “street photography” deserves a post all on its own, but let’s define it as the observer’s art. The photographer might be walking around a mundane street corner, when something worth shattering the surrounding anonymity for calls out to them. Sometimes they are in spaces where they are wanted—in the case of a clique of school kids posing together by a crosswalk. Sometimes the photographer is clearly in a place where their looking is violently protested, or sneaking. If you have ever tried to do street photography you can attest to this fright. Everyone, camera in hand or not, holds this fear within them as they walk in public. There is something quietly fearful in “merely” noticing your surroundings. It’s not just a fear of being perceived, it’s something deeper, it’s what shames sight all together. Isn’t it provoking when a stranger turns to look at what you’re taking a picture of? We are never at ease on the sidewalk though we’d like to be. I am not even sure we’d like to be. Even in a good mood we must wear a face of indifference for the sake of our fellow man.
I’ll end this piece by showing you some pictures I like (since I’m being such a dick) that better show what I mean.
Is Tavepong Pratoomwong’s street photography, like this poem?
No. Ogden’s pithy subject matter still says something He’s animated the epistemology of the fly. It says, in its brevity, in its parsimony of words, that ‘annoyance’ can’t be swatted. Despite the words having been probably copied and printed onto mugs sold at Michaels, I still find myself clucking my tongue. The history of our exasperation with fighting flies, shooing them off our scarlet cheeks and ticklish forearms, lives on the page. We are tired of being tired of these fuckers, to the extent that we’ve called into question the nature of our relationship with the creator Herself.
A lot of work is owed to its short format. There’s a humility in a sentence long poem. Each word drastically changes the face of the work. The stakes are high, without ever revealing it. It’s also sparse, and so, familiar. Show me an asteroid in full 8k street view and I'll show you which crag is interesting to me. We see every letter as fitting a puzzle and then finally a nursery rhyme scheme—which calls to mind that painting-now-meme of a man standing up in court about to commit his brightest moment, the one he will repeat to his grandkids, the one that will give him his second eponymous name, lasting under his picture at the local waffle house, when he declaims in a crowded court of suits, that his prized American values are under threat and along with it, the honest cause of a million more people like him. Though his vocabulary is simple, and his slack jaw even simpler, there is a simple truth in him that is tender and whole, and can move a vote in favor of labor at large. Just because of that very closeness in his words.
It doesn’t have to be manufactured so obsessively, but it should feel like all the elements of a photo, the shading, the brightness, the curve of a road, all of it are implicated in severe consequence with each other. Kind of like the lasting details of a century-old cold case, a deposition from the mailman restlessly turns over in your hypnagogic mind.
The places he travel to are plumb full of ideas, but it’s almost like Tavepong is barred entry from engaging with exactly those deeper details. Guy who comes back from his escorted tour in North Korea with a sense of whimsy.
His pieces call nothing from within me. Nothing tender, shocking, or maddening. Nothing that, say from the shape of a shadow, causes it to lace around my orbital vision. The lights are either muted, or sharp, consistently haphazard. The darks are just completely, I mean unnecessarily, brought to the wraith brink, and then turned down just before the basic silhouette could at least mean something on its own. It’s not even bleak for fucks sake. These stylistic choices that can be manipulated in the editing phase somehow keep him coming back for more. Right back at it for that rare once-in-a-lifetime feeling he’s going for, his dialed-in “right place, right time” brand. The scenes feel manufactured yet the editing feels ignored. How perverse.
Here’s an exemplary artwork that I would consider street photography, achieved by a manufactured stage:
One selects a photo from a group. They plucked it from a field of soon-to-be discards because they were confronted by something. Either the ‘prick’, the feeling that initially caused them to take the photo is present, or something else. Something that in the editing phase they then make delicate, dust off, place against a black canvas. Even if no one photo on its own says something as a whole, its chosen because a ‘through line’ appears in it.
Photography settles the age-old question, “if a man swung his axe and randomly made the image of a cow out a block of wood, can we consider that cow a work of art?” because photography is never merely an innocent act. A generationally interesting photo can theoretically be found in a trash bin. We are always looking for the “cow” by the grace of chance. The looking starts even before the camera shutters, just as it does when we are looking through a stack of prints in the culling phase. The tedious looking continues on in the editing phase. Again even before, way way way before, in the gear selection phase, or in your clock app, when you set an alarm to go off for tomorrow morning. Tavepong is confused in every way that doesn’t matter, wields an actual cow-shaped axe, and moves through international woods with a syncopatic commercial efficiency.
Some IG comments followed by the photos they’re in praise of:
My apologies for even touching a camera
Some people just see the world so beautifully man
My camera looked at me and sighed
Bro have actual art of noticing!!
I’m just say here in shock with how great these are
Juxtapositions at its best
This right here is exactly why they invited cameras
All of these photos have the cache of a straining tourist holding up the Pisa tower from collapse. Why would I even bother writing about this? Because of Instagram? Because Vantage, a writing profile on Medium that hosts 71k subscribers between its four editors, said1 in a dedicated article that “(Pratoomwong) mixes the surreal with the ordinary in juxtapositions of grace and beauty?” Tavepong holds eight photography awards. I’m bugging. I can’t get those two monkey’s fucking out of my head. And not in the ordinary way great art stays with me after its been flash seared onto my psyche, blooming as time shifts forward. That photo is like a pebble in my shoe, scraping away at my skin, making an enemy out of my sock.
Stanley Cavell writing on fraudulence brings into view the responsibility of the critic: “He is part detective, part lawyer, part judge, in a country in which crimes and deeds of glory look alike, and in which the public therefore not only confuses one with the other, but does not know that one or the other has been committed.”
As we did in the poem, let’s discuss and see what we can mine from this photo:
Its a bit hard to place our attention anywhere particularly meaningful so we will start with the general interesting points of the subject’s faces. The girl’s expression in the center is worried, as if her name’s been suddenly called out from behind us, captured here in her half-disconcerted position, head still resting in her hand, legs yet to be moved to stand. Another gal is approaching the group with a matching outfit. Hard to say what this means either—is this a uniform, or a trendy outfit in that area? It’s clearly an uneventful night out. There’s a guy there and he seems unconcerned with either subjects or the incident happening outside of the frame. The lighting has the manufactured glow of a roadside club. Let me dumb this down even further. She’s a damsel in distress. She’s owed to that guy in a tragic way, but she yearns to be away, somewhere, somewhere is passing her by in that very moment! But I can’t even get to that pithy cliché because he’s done nothing, at the very least done nothing, special with the textures of her face, or the shadows, or the bus. This is a flat snapshot of four people, and a bus, by a random dirt road. I’ll reserve a modicum of self-reflexivity to say that there may be a deep well of significance for the people in Thailand who recognize that girl, or that outfit, but I won’t hold my breath.
Listen, I know I sound like I’m being harsh, he’s popular for reasons that are out of his hands. I’m sure he’s chill. And genuinely, I like this one:
But I can’t consider Tavepong a good photographer. I think he is clearly unserious, classifiably-so by the hands of his droll typography. No style, no collected commentary, and certainly no tone that should command any presence in the street photography world.
Tavepong has provoked me for far too long, let’s look at what I like. Let’s look at real artists. Subjectivity is still owed some responsibility. And this time I’ll let the art do the talking. If you are interested in street photography please message me so we can talk about it. I would love to see who you like and what photos have stuck with you.
Andre D Wagner
Josef Koudelka
Lisa Safarti
Lastly, here’s something I wrote in another story that I end up deleting from there:
Taking a picture, is where an exasperated self-preservation has gone to be sensible. Merely light, merely me. After the camera, there can be no more discontent with our humanity. We’ve pitied even the extent of death, and its grown exhausted of its own brutality. There, there is a romantic friendship to be found. A moment of stillness is unsettling, but welcome. Confusion that fascinates the artist is the confusion of their relevancy in this newly constituted reality. A mystical chirality holds photography in accord with our being. Our desire to give ourselves up to looking, the sentimental behavior of wanting. Quivering and breath-fully resigned. Rare are the moments when victory looks this dignifying.
More uploads coming frequently. I was completely indisposed to write in November and December. January, February, March will have one upload each not including this one cause its not January yet.
https://medium.com/vantage/monkey-business-with-street-photographer-tavepong-pratoomwong-bf55cfcf7b7e
More please do every photographer ever
oh oh yes I think this one might be lovely I think this one is a bit of a winner