Prism of Photography: Dispersion of Knowledge and Memories of the 6th October Massacre
Thanavi Chotpradit and Kornkrit Jianpinidnan
Self-published: 2019
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What can one discover when one lets an image speak for itself? Such was my first thought when opening Prism of Photography: Dispersion of Knowledge and Memories of the 6th October Massacre, the brainchild of the art historian Thanavi Chotpradit and the artist Kornkrit Jianpinidnan, who took upon themselves the daunting task of engaging with different archives about one of the bloodiest events in Thailand’s Cold War history: the massacre on 6 October 1976 at Thammasat University. University students were detained and murdered by both the state military and right-wing protesters, which unravelled into a series of horrific scenes encapsulated and curated in this book. As one gears up for an onslaught of the visual grotesque that ensues, one cannot help but consider the body as a site of contestation, the photograph as an entity that alternates between clarity and opacity, and how archival materials can be complicit in weaving historical or nationalistic narratives.
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