ZA :

It’s intriguing to understand the journey of a photographer who started out in the field of photojournalism, and now primarily uses image-making as a tool of artistic expression. I was hoping to deconstruct the two diverse styles that quite uniquely sit together in your world.

CA :

In high school, I was always drawing, writing, was part of a theatre troupe, and co-founded the school radio. I had expected the drawing to lead somewhere, but my world turned upside down when Paris’ top art schools rejected my applications. Rather than waiting a year, I ended up studying linguistics instead. This led me to journalism and photography. It all finally seemed in order and dreams of being an artist had long gone, but a few years into my career, the formulaic nature of shooting daily news stories made me move towards more experimental practices. Eventually, the pandemic pushed my experimentation much further. I guess in the back of my mind, I found this idea of ‘The Decisive Moment,’ almost tyrannical, which is surely a big word to describe it, but I could not be bound by a singular moment. When I was pursuing photojournalism, one of my colleagues said something rather interesting- he said, “If you saw it, then you missed it,” which basically means that if you weren’t clicking while seeing it, you have missed the scene. To me, it was akin to paranoia, this intense sense of FOMO that I would feel as a photojournalist. And it was liberating for me to let that go, and now work with something that I can’t fully control.

ZA :

When I read your imagery in the projects Apopheniac, Immemorium, and Not T/here, I’m drawn to the non-conforming nature of your photographs. They seem to be perennially moving off a static page in reckless abandon, taking a form that the viewer chooses to see. Could you speak about this aspect of your practice?

CA :

When I began my work with a photojournalistic project titled Yantra- inspired by the talismanic Thai tattoo tradition, known as Sak Yant, I began experimenting with adding chemistry directly onto my emulsion. I was interested in the texture of an image, which is something that I continued in Fragments, which I later renamed to Immemorium. In that, I used polaroid negatives that are the part of a polaroid that you usually discard and instead applied it in the image-making process. The constantly evolving deconstructed photographs echo Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the instability of meaning and the fluid nature of time. In humid conditions like Thailand, they keep changing. In fact, if I open these boxes right here, which I haven’t done in 6 months, I’m going to see how they have reacted with the humidity and dust. I purposely don’t store them in an archival way because it goes against the idea of elevating that one frame, and that one moment frozen in time. With Apopheniac I’m exploring the fluidity in the process of memory. The images are reinterpreted, by physically melting them. I’m quite obsessed with neuroscience and the emergence of patterns, and Apopheniac is an ode to that aspect of myself.

ZA :

It’s interesting that you mention that because at first glance, the patterns in Apopheniac reminded me of neurons getting activated in the brain during a thought…

CA :

I’ve always been fascinated with the workings of the brain and consciousness. In fact I probably have 50 books about neuroscience, and not many photobooks! My mother reminded me of this moment with her when I was a child and visited the Natural History Museum in Paris, and was absolutely transfixed by a brain in a jar. What’s funny about that moment is that I don't know if what I remember is her telling me the story, or the actual moment itself. That goes straight to the subject that I’m exploring in Apopheniac, which is a play on memory and how we get attached to something and try to remember it. Often, people refer to the camera as a ‘memory machine,’ but that’s also inaccurate. It got me thinking about the writings of Susan Sontag and John Berger and the inaccuracy of images, and the need for the brain to rebuild and find patterns that don’t necessarily exist. Apophenia is maniacal, and Apopheniac isn’t even a word. I just decided to add a ‘c’ at the end of this word where one perceives meaning in something non-existent.

ZA :

Sally Mann once wrote that “photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.” Does the physical manipulation of your original photographs scare you?

CA :

In the beginning, there was a sense of guilt, but I wasn’t doing this with any images that were very personal, or even historical. Even though, any image can eventually become historical. Take the image of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky that was on the cover of Time Magazine when the scandal broke. Before the scandal, the image didn’t have much meaning, and in fact the photographer said that if he were shooting digitally, he would have probably deleted it. So of course, this was playing on my mind, and maybe in 10-15 years I might even regret it, but at that point, will the original image even matter? We remember our last memory of a moment. We’re constantly rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting. Maybe Apopheniac is a metaphor to get rid of unpleasant memories and rewrite them with something else.

ZA :

I find that to be a photojournalist, one must have a sense of loyalty towards both, the image as well as the situation. Since you seem to be someone who revels in this idea of letting go, I was wondering if as a photojournalist you carried a sense of possessiveness at all? Or rather, did you feel like you were a little too possessive and hence wanted to back away from that style of image-making?

CA :

That’s a very good question. Over time I realised I’m not built for a Press Scrum. Some reporters thrive on the fast-paced turnover of the news cycle and are in constant competition for the front page or the double spread. I’m much more of a contemplative photographer, especially because I read and research a lot and am highly influenced by literature and cinema, along with science of course! But was I possessive? Of course I was, because of the need to try and get an image. Documenting the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was when things changed for me. I was photographing for the Evening Standard, and found myself in competition with people from Paris and London who had flown down to Thailand and were only focusing on their own citizens who were affected by the tsunami. Barely any of them were interested in the local stories. I was sitting in the luxury of the Marriot and being congratulated for one of my images of a hand with rigour mortis reaching out to the sky surrounded by cadavers that got the double page spread and suddenly felt so dizzy and numb. It all seemed ironic with the amount of people suffering around us. It’s when I realised that I might not actually be the best photojournalist, because I was just three years into my career, already questioning it as a medium. Q6. Even then, both, your documentary as well as portraiture work exudes a sense of slowness. There’s a cinematic quality to the imagery that is showcased by the light as well as the quietude in the frame…

I’m highly inspired by cinema, and as a lecturer in Bangkok, I’m always referencing cinematographers and filmmakers in my classes about photography. I’m often surprised that cinematographers are influenced by photographers, but you barely hear references the other way around. Having lived in Southeast Asia for 23 years, my work has strong influences from Asian filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang who made Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I’m also drawn to the documentary work by Chris Marker, and of course, Tarkovsky. I appreciate the move away from the three-act formula of Hollywood where a transformation is necessary. Most of the filmmakers I admire don’t follow a system and are very observational. In fact, In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai was shot in my neighbourhood of Chinatown, and it certainly had an effect on my work.

ZA :

In the artist statement for Apopheniac you write “This text was inspired by a conversation with Chat GPT, comparing human false memories to AI hallucinations. The large language model quoted research from a neuroscience paper produced by one of the most reputable neuroscience labs in the world. Neither the research paper nor the author actually exists.” As someone who uses analog extensively, could you elaborate on this convergence with Artificial Intelligence?

CA :

One of the first people to mention that my images were reminiscent of computer-generated images was Jeff Gompertz, an American artist who lives in Bangkok and has had quite an influence on me. And at first, I was borderline offended, because they were truly organic and handmade during the pandemic. At that time, AI images were very basic GANs and very low resolution. But over time, as things progressed, I understood the point he was trying to make, and I downloaded ChatGPT to explore my fascination with why we misremember, and human false memories. That’s when ChatGPT hallucinated the entire research and invented a fake paper from Kyoto University while comparing human false memories to AI hallucinations. We live in such a convergence of these two worlds - the information age and us as organic beings, that drawing parallels between the two makes me think of the truth in photography.