Ultrawide & Wide for Muay Thai Photography

I've always been very drawn to wide lenses for Muay Thai photography, if only to get away from all the focus on "the action" and the proverbial sweat-spray shot. Mostly I've shot with longer lenses to get away from this moving in the opposite direction, to explore more the psychological aspects of fighting, and to locate what might be called sculptural body forms, but honestly, I've wanted much more to shoot in wider lenses, because I think the sense of space, of emptiness, is really what the art of fighting is about, like scuba diving is about what you do IN the ocean. Its harder to do in fights themselves because you don't have control over your setting and are locked more or less into one or only a few vantage points.

I've been lately interested in the Contax 645 35mm lens (27mm full frame), (above), adapted for the GFX system, in part because it seems to give that "what the eye sees" kind of field of view, something that I find in many of the beautiful films of the 1960s, and some early documentary photography. You can see a short article on the lens that attracted me. I want a little more of that tableau feeling, with some beautiful sample shots. I love this sort of photography, and I'd like to bring that nobility to Muay Thai. What I'm interested in with this Contax lens is that many times I encounter situational muay, often with older fighters, scenes that are full of details and composition, that it just feels like it has to all be captured, rendered, brought forward.

With that in mind I went back to my Fujifilm 8-16mm (12-24mm ff), above, which I really forget how much I love, a wide angle zoom on the X-series cameras that is underrated in the images it can pull. I have shot some very memorable photos with it. Today I shot Sylvie training with Chatchai at his Thai Payak gym in Bangkok just to get reacquainted with the wider view. I want to get used to seeing-in-wide again. You can maybe see what I see even in these somewhat casual shots, the way that the space envelopes the figures, and the figures almost arise from it. Note. I'm not a super technical photographer, and not really a gear person. I see things I like in my mind, my hands, and then look for ways to achieve it. I do like the 8-16mm, and its zoom is really very helpful in muay settings where you cannot change your position easily to alter the composition. With ultrawide this is really important especially regarding the distortion, not only how much distortion there is, but what it is that is distorted. The zoom is super valuable.

photos on this thread are unfortunately compressed and lose sharpness.

I'm hoping to see more wide angle and even ultra wide treatment of the sport, because the art is really all about the spaces that hold it. And I've ordered the Contax lens and the adapter, the first time I'll have shot with a vintage lens. I'm very excited to see what will show up on the very large and detailed GFX files.

Arjan Surat, Dejrat Gym (Bangkok)

Takrowlek Dejrat Gym (Bangkok)

I invite you to click on each photo above, on a big screen, and really look at these wonderful men

This is the story of this new style of portrait, and observations I've made about shooting Muay Thai in black and white over the last few years.

For a while now I've wanted to shoot a different sort of black and white portrait, especially of Muay Thai legends, fighters and krus. It's an extension of my fine art tastes, the way I want to lift the subject to a high (culturally coded) aesthetic, capturing their true dignity as fighters and as men. I purchased some additional equipment, put on a filter I had experimented with in the past, and set to it. It was going to take a while before I zoned in on what I wanted, something rich, soulful, detailed - or so I thought. But practically my first photos taken (of Sylvie, not posted anywhere as yet) were kind of stunning. Among the best portraits I've taken of her. Each frame showed a different quality. Each frame seemed to be pointing to something deep, something that also changed with the edit itself.

In any case these are two photos I took yesterday in Bangkok, both noble men of the Dejrat gym, a Golden Age legendary kru and his fighter. For some time was really hoping to photograph Arjan Surat, as he just has so much natural majesty, and I didn't even know what style of photo I wanted to take with him, other than it being an intimate portrait. In the first one of the frames his strong features resisted this Deep Black edit style, other edits were better and more expressive, so I turned back to Takrowlek, and wow, this one (the 2nd above) just sang. It is really a profound photo, among the best I've been able to reach for, yet it feels like it all comes from him. I went back to my Arjan Surat frames and looked for where I could do something in the same spirit. I wanted to see the differences between the men. There is something to this edit in which the eyes just become incredibly expressive, a true individualism. I found the right frame (almost none of the others would work).

It's enough to say, I've found an aesthetic vein I really want to run down...but, there is just one significant problem: black and white photographs, especially of people, are strongly coded as photos of death in the culture. I suspect as well that with the advent of more widespread color printing (magazines and such) that followed the economic boom (at least in Muay Thai), color indicated all the good things of life. It was rich, dynamic, "modern", not the pale newsprint of the past (more on this in following posts). Missing, perhaps, are our (Western) strong associations with Classic looks, or fine art, which today's Black and White can exude. Westerners and Thais can see these differently.

I wrote a little about this problem as a photographer on Twitter more than a year ago. I want as a photographer, perhaps more than anything, to show a subject themselves in a beautiful way, to lift them up in their eyes...but, my own black and white aesthetics, combined with my American "working man" sensibilities, celebrating the lines of a face, really run hard against widespread Thai aesthetics.

Complicating the matter further is that dark skin is considered less desirable and ugly in Thailand, likely with strong ethnic and racial (even racist) overtones. (Emma Thomas wrote about racism in Thailand several years ago.) Aside from the broader themes of lighter skin beauty, in terms of Thailand's Muay Thai the darker complexions of Isaan, for instance, ethnically close to those of Laos & the Khmer, to which the region is connected and woven from, register as socially low. Many of these in history are perhaps read in the context of conquered peoples (the burgeoning Siam/Thai Nation indeed raided to the Northeast and would capture and repopulate areas inland, a practice of capture and indentured slave taking that goes back to before the Ayutthaya period, at least 500 years of not more). Today whiteness is the mark of beauty. Skin whitening products are everywhere. And this whiteness is not merely the Whiteness of the Westerner, it is prominently the Whiteness of Chinese-like, or K-Pop beauty influence. A sign of affluence. Light skin matters.

above a skin-whitening product, with a masculinity-type that is quite popular in media in Thailand, far from many Isaan-born Nak Muay.

So, when I'm trying to capture the dignity of Thai men, many of them from the lower social classes, my working man aesthetics, and classic fine art sensibilities can run hard against the very cultural picture of beauty, firmly a standard carried by the elite of the country, seen in every television commercial, and every Instagram or phone beautification filter. And, within Thailand as new forms of Muay Thai try to transmute the Muay Thai of the provinces into a Entertainment Bangkok version appealing to hi-so (upper class, high society) Thais, and to Western fighters and their audiences, these lines of color in photography happen to also reflect class and cultural divisions within the sport and art. There is a sort of whitening of Muay Thai that is happening in Thailand. When photographing and preserving the heritage of Muay Thai I am less interested in the dominant history of the Bangkok Capital, as officially recorded, and more looking to the roots of the sport in its fighters, and the practices that anchored that developed it, much of this of rural, lower-class origin. So in some sense I'm going to be working across the overarching aesthetic of the culture which is shaped by the social realities, really the hegemonies of the Capital and its commerce. But, in tension, as a photographer I am also bringing forth Western appeals to classic aesthetics, elevating working and rural classes in the way that Western aesthetics have evolved to do so. These aesthetics are my way, my hands and fingers, of reaching out and touching the dignity of these men, as I am able to see it...and as I want others to be able see it.

I briefly wrote about the difficulty of darker toned, black and white photographs more than a year ago here (its fully quoted below, no need to click through):
 

Quote

One of the interesting things in photographing Thailand's Muay Thai is that we (Westerners) come at it from an ideological place of "grit". We want the sweat, hardened lines, the "weather". Thais though see this as "old". Blown out filters are common on social media. Two edits:

I love the edit on the right, but have steered away from it as, as a photographer, I want to photograph within someone something they would like to see in themselves. The tension between West vs Thai is strong in this. Also, the way that even black & white is perceived in Thailand is very different. We can bring in the romanticism of high-art, or classic black and white cinema. A throwback crystallization. But b&w might instead look very old "newspaper" to Thais, or even indicate funeral loss. This is changing as Thais adopt more international high-art aesthetics, but there is also a ballast in the culture. Often I have to think to myself: Should I edit this photo in black and white? even when I prefer to. I do think there is something to be gained to cut across the urge to classic-fy photographs of Muay Thai thru black and white, and explore color treatments that can be read across cultures more. But, my eye is also very black & white driven, and I compare MT to traditional worlds.

Because the wealthy in the country are increasingly portrayed in smooth-skinned, sometime even face-bloating plastic surgery, blown-out whites, the edged, darkening gritty contrasts above (that I love to see) become unbeautiful. Perhaps like photographs that make you look old, or fat. These are strong, aesthetic reactions, anchored in the culture, part of a much wider culture of whitening in Asia. Below you can see the adjustments the former fighter Morakot made to my photograph of him, passing it through a beautifying filter before posting it on Facebook. He generally though passed all his photos through filters before posting.

It isn't just the tone of skin, as mentioned it is also that black and white photographs can be coded as funerary. So, there are two aspects at play: any darkening of the skin tone (and hard contrasts that bring forward hard lines), and then the absence of color itself. It's a complex of aspects of black and white imagery.

It just so happens, a few days before taking the two portraits at top I had taken a portrait I really enjoyed of the great coach and former fighter Chatchai Sasakul, a black and white which was best not in the Deep Black style of this post. We sent him the photo privately and he posted it on his Facebook page. It felt good to be embraced. I'm always hesitant to edit and post black and white photographs, even though this aesthetic is properly mine, it's very meaningful to me, and it's central to how I see as a photographer. I do post plenty of black and white photographs, but each and every time I am wary, concerned that the subject just won't like to see themselves that way.

One of the worst things happened. A very powerful promoter saw the photograph Chatchai in a post wherein Chatchai had written about how successful his gym has suddenly become and how thankful he is in celebration of the support everyone is giving. He has several champions in his stable now, and he was smiling...the promoter commented: Please don't post black and white photographs, it scared me, I thought you were dead. Surely, just said off-hand, and maybe even light-heartedly, but it had a big effect. Chatchai took the photo down, replaced it with a color one, and it became something of a point of talk. It is true that black and white photography, especially on social media, can be funerary in Thailand. Admittedly, the usual signature for a funeral photo on social media is a color photo turned black and white, and Chatchai's big smile may have made that particular photo more prone to misreading.

In any case, when I took the camera out to take Takrowlek's portrait a few days later he mentioned the talk about the photo. I could feel some nervousness as I stood in front of him with my camera, and after only a few frames he looked away. I stopped photographing. Thais are very socially sensitive, and small group opinions matter. He didn't know, perhaps, what kind of photo I would take. And, I wonder if this look in his eyes where he resolved himself to the photo, in the very first frame, is where his wonderful spirit comes through, a kind of defiant spirit. The interesting thing about Takrowlek is that of all Thai in Thailand he actually has reacted most positively to my black and white photographs in the past. He's shared my previous black and white photographs of himself, enthusiastically. And he repeatedly shares the very gritty, high contrast photo I took of his brother, the fellow fighter and kru Chatchainoi (below), someone he deeply loves.

above, Chatchainoi

And in the aftermath of my taking those previous photos, Takrowlek started taking dark, high contrast black and white photographs self portraits, and posting them on Facebook. He was exploring black and white photography artistically. In fact, when we entered his gym yesterday to shoot he had a very large, chiaroscuro photo of his daughter on the wall, which he seemed to have taken. He enjoys the black and white aesthetic. He's an original, somewhat iconoclastic thinker, strong in his opinion, and he embraced the black and white aesthetic for himself.

In fact when we sent him my new portraits, I sent two. The beautiful dark one you see at the top of this post, and a much more neutral color photograph, and told him please don't feel like you have to post any of these, they are just for you. He could pick what he liked.

above, the color photo sent along with the Deep Black portrait. Not an edit I would preferably do, but one made to allow more choice. It is a nice photograph, his sweetness comes through, but I would probably push for more out of it.

Takrowlek immediately wrote back that between the two he loved the Deep Black portrait, and even gave a description of what he saw in it, the eyes. I was surprised given his hesitance when shooting, given the social spin put on Chatchai's photograph. I had been quite concerned that it may be hard to even get someone to sit for such a portrait after the bias against black and white portraiture had been given so much wind in those sails. How am I even going to take enough photographs to explore this new portrait style? His response lightened my heart, and gave me some hope. I really want to take these Deep Black portraits, of many Muay Thai fighters and krus, and want to show their eyes, their soul, in a dignified way that maybe the overall culture does not appreciate. I want people to be able to see into them and this mode of photography accomplishes that.

He responded to my share of his Deep Black portrait with these heartening words:

first (machine translate): The picture is ordinary, but what you see, the depth of your eyes, is amazing. Thank you to the photographer. Thank you, thank you.

then: Sincerity is always expressed through the eyes, even without words.

He understands and feels the power of the style, how it draws out the eyes and communicates the heart of the soul. This is so meaningful to me. The portrait landed. This means that the photograph, these photographs, to some degree transcend cultural bounds. The capacity of them to express the eyes means something in both cultural matrices. In that sense they can be unifying.

I'm not sure where this leaves me in my drive to photograph more krus and fighters in my Deep Black portrait style. I'm not sure how readable it is to most of the men I would photograph. I've had very beautiful photographs I took at Rajadamnern in another style, just strong, strong black and whites like no other Muay Thai photographs I've seen, privately be asked to be turned into color by fighters, when I send them to them privately. Their unusual character, something I savor, does not read. And I do not blame them at all, I'm moving against the broad spectrum aesthetic in the culture, and even most sport photography in my own culture. Most Muay Thai photography is hyper colored, very crunchy, almost comic book or digital in style. Very "sweat-spray" and popping. You can see my Rajadamnern photographs here, very moody, sculptural, or psychological, and trending toward fineart (in the West).

Shooting Rajadamnern in Black and White

This was a huge traditional Muay Thai show, everything about it was about color and pop, trying to compete in a high-productive value space with forward-leaning hype of Entertainment Muay Thai which has been beating down the traditional sport. It was the show of the year, proof that the traditional Muay Thai art, which thrived in the old, dingy but profoundly charactered Lumpinee (now gone) could compete in the newly remodeled, updated Rajadamnern Stadium, full of digital screens, light shows. The show actually was not televised, on purpose, nor streamed, because it wanted to call back the great days of in-person gambling and attendance, and featured the biggest fighters in the sport. I experienced the event very differently, because I was not raised in a developing country, peaking now. I am from a country that largely set the tone for commercial development in the 20th century, with American soft power, and in fact suffered from its excesses and loss of meaning it has brought. In Rajadamnern I found a beautiful, old style theater space, a mix of associations, reminiscent of a town's movie theater where everyone went on a Saturday night, or a small, much respected live theater in New York City where great performances were done but only 500 people saw them, in its past. I felt transported to an intimacy, a theatrical intimacy, that was quite special, one any American would want to feel. It felt like a Hollywood premiere, but in a classic age, so for me the classic, missing-from-my-culture, lost-to-my-culture aspects came out as a photographed. (Note, this rare traditional show, with its glorious wall of gamblers, is quite different than many of the shows that now work out of Rajadamnern, which turn their eye to the entertainment Western and Chinese tourist.)

above, three screen caps of photos from the big Rajadamnern Stadium show (see the whole album here)

I, with my Westernized aesthetic, see absolute human beauty in those two lower photographs. They feel classic, elevated, but also full of vigor and intensities. The sculptural aspects and the play of light on form (Rajadamnern has spectacular stadium lighting) really come forward for me. This felt like the acme of Muay Thai. The Scorsese film Raging Bull, itself a homage to black and white classics before him, including the boxing film Body and Soul, which in part inspired that film (do see it if you love Boxing and classic film) is evoked, because (unlike much of Thailand) we in American harken back to our own sporting past, much of it from the working class, heroing those great performances with glory. We relate to our past differently.

For this reason the history of 1950s boxing in America, and its capture in media, its representation, I think has powerful visual resonance with Thailand's classic age of Muay Thai, at least for Westerners, because its a lens through which we can understand and celebrate the sport...as classic. No doubt American Boxing itself exerted influence on Thailand and its Muay Thai in the middle of the century, and photographing in this way for me connects up with that historical cross-over, and aligns with America's own glorification of the lower class heroes of generational pugilism. This is an honorific aesthetic, with footing in the sport itself. Arguments can be made that Thailand Muay Thai's Golden Age (1980-1994) homologously mirrors to some degree Boxing's mid-Century era.

You can read about the significant influence of Western Boxing on Thailand's early century Muay Thai here The State of Early Modern Muay Thai and British Boxing

above, Jake LaMatta reffing a boxing match at Rajadamnern Stadium in 1969, an appearance which began new emphasis on boxing in the National Stadia which lasted for decades.

This is to say, this kind of Muay Thai photography is readable to the West because of our own retroactive cinematic embrace of American boxing. The aesthetic is readable because it draws on Western conventions and our history. It communicates values that have developed over time, values I champion as an artist. They are not readily readable in Thai culture, even though the culture is internationalizing quickly. (Ironic that I advocate for the non-Internationalization of the traditional sport, as it is fought, bending as it has been to Western fight aesthetics and rules, while as a photographer I bring distinct Western aesthetics, even Americanized aesthetics to the history and preservation of traditional Muay Thai and its men. I realize a tension here.) It's my belief though that there is a the gift that Thailand's traditional Muay Thai has for the West, and to accelerating Globalization. It is the way it embodies many readable classic, lower-class valorizations of ring fighting, yet specifically through its Buddhistic cultural approach to violence itself, in an art that is viewed as quite violent by the West, through aesthetics of calm, control and respect. Thailand, as it is quite busy trying to imitate Western fighting styles, internalizing those aggression-first fighting ethics, trying to draw those dollars and yuan into their economy as an entertainment value, has a much deeper and more profound gift to give to the world...something that is readable in terms of the classic aesthetics of Western fighting traditions. It is the unique way Thais treat the possibles of ring violence, and the notion of dignity within conflict. These irreplaceable values are found in the men who trained and fought, men of color (as it would be qualified in the West), especially in the latter part of the 20th century.

In this sense, my black and white photographs work towards a mixed socio-political dimension, in that they run against the Thai upper-class, but also internationalizing aesthetics of whitening in the culture, leaning toward the darker skin-tones of much of the provincial roots of Thailand's Muay Thai, far from the Capital. Many not only ethnically darker, but also darker for working in the Sun. (During Bangkok's economic boom of the 1980s provincial workers of the fields would develop a factory white complexion, now working long hours indoors, perhaps a signature of having modern, gainful, industrial employment or more neutrally just having moved to the city and left the fields. Going to the city was called "going to get your white face". As a foreigner I am interested in the aspects of Muay Thai that are not born from its internationalizing mixtures, those that are most distinctly Thai, and so the greatness of these men pictured outside of the aesthetic whitening of the sport work back toward those rural anchors, anchors that are largely diminished in Thailand's own telling of the sport. But, as a high-brow American aesthetic, an aesthetic capable of Noir nostalgias for lost traditions and classic masculinities, and an Americanized individualism of the elevated working man, and pugalistic character, the potential appeal of this style to Thais is itself internationalizing, introducing concepts of liberty and new value. As I post below subsequently in this thread, affluent photography students may themselves explore the dark moods of strong black and white contrast photography, at least in part influenced by Western fine art and Western cinematic history. This is not a cut and dry, good/bad, authentic/inauthentic situation of judgements, these are braided threads. I myself was very likely invited to see Thailand's Muay Thai in very chiaroscuro Noir terms, because of a Thai photographer more than a decade ago: see those photos here. Aesthetics have their own propagating life.

Not Darkening or Lightening Skin, But Changing the Meaning of Light

And, any discussion of skin-color and social status (colorism) needs to appreciate that cultures are not a monolith, though its common to treat them that way, and when talking about Western or American culture it too has its colorisms. My aesthetics come out of my class, race and history. Going back to the 2008 Beyonce controversy with L'Oreal and skin tone lightening, up to present day skin-tone accusations in media and presentation, we've learned that lightness or darkness of skin in photography can always be understood as politicized.

And one could imagine that my photographic eye is in some sense exoticizing Thai fighters, perhaps seeing in them working man, fighting man valorization, things that map onto American ideologies of gritty cowboys, people of the Land or urban fighters of the past, cast in this case in the Other. In this I carry something of rugged American individualism, the promise of social mobility of determination & character, quite far from most Thai identities which are more filial and group, almost clan oriented. These are fair slices of judgement to take upon my photographs. We are dealing with idealized forms of masculinity, a hypermasculinity as Peter Vail would say. I though point out that I do photograph my wife, as a fighter, often in the same very dark or gritty motifs (some here), such as the one below from a few years ago, one of my favorite portraits of her (perhaps accidentally invoking masculinity-coded Ripley of Alien). This is just how I see a fighter. And as with Thai fighters sometimes my photos do not correspond to her own preferences of how she'd like to be portrayed, too edged (I am forced to draw back); it is something I have to balance. I've as mentioned I also photographed her in my new Deep Black portrait aesthetic (unposted) and they are just incredibly beautiful photographs, some of the best I've ever taken of her. I've had large prints made. Often though I have to temper how gritty or texturally harsh I might capture her, the woman that I love. I would say though that in some arguable sense photography always exoticizes its subject, cutting them/it out from reality's context, lifting up aspects through light, composition and texture, suppressing others, communicating ideal values, many of them subconscious. This is to say, when we create art we will always be importing the collectivity of images we have received, and we are all "taught how to read" images as part of our socialization, imparting values to them of the classes we belong to, and aspire to. From my view I am not darkening or lightening skin in my photographs, I am changing the value of light itself. Sometimes this will leave very dark tones on the skin, but will elevate small details and textures, and let luminosity pinpoint or show through, sometimes skin will become extremely white, bringing forth the form of the body, or compositions.

Much of my aim as a photographing artist is to raise of the sport and art of Muay Thai to the Western eye, who is primarily my audience, and in many ways it makes sense that as I seek to reveal the value of its men to the West I turn to the most classic versions of image, I move towards fine art, as I find it. I use expensive, capable lenses and appeal to the history of Film Noir, and overall to cinema, which is my history. And I'll admit that when I started photographing Muay Thai one of my ambitions was to actually change the way Muay Thai was photographed, which I found quite dissatisfying. There was very little Muay Thai black and white photography in the media ecosystem (it was actually a great photograph of Sylvie taken by Lord K2 which might have triggered my photographic path), and my love of classic film has taken over for me in some of my styles. At the bottom of this post I'll link a thread I started discussing why I want to bring the Film Noir aesthetic to Muay Thai, something which goes beyond just aesthetics. It goes into the very world of Noir, and its treatment of urban, or lower status characters, its framing of masculinity. There is a moral universe it builds which comments complexly on Thailand's Muay Thai, its own status in the hierarchies of culture and its masculinity. It could be imagined that my photos have may influenced other Muay Thai photographers to wade black and white aesthetics, which are more common now, just as I was influenced.

The Lord K2 photo, a poor copy of which we hang on our wall

My new experiments with a Deep Black portrait style indeed grew out of my Film Noir, classics aesthetics, but really are also far from them as they are stereotypically conceived, especially in aspects of softness and how it relates to darkness. These photos more seek a way to isolate the seeds of a person in even the finest flickers of light, especially about the eyes, but also in the expressive feature of the face, which you have to strain for a little bit to discover. It's a bit like seeing in the dark, and letting your eyes adjust maybe. (There are examples of this in Film Noir, in the next post). The darkness is there not in tone, but in order to let the light have its own life, its own small power. They participate in the black and white fine art tradition, but for me texturally at another end of the spectrum from much of stylized Film Noir. But, my question, my hurdle is how to negotiate this strong aesthetic urge to photograph these noble men, thus, so nobly, but within a culture where dark is bad or low. I want to show the shining light, which in a sense needs that darkness all around it. It's how these men shine through. And how the sport and art of Muay Thai shines through, from its place in history.

Below, my thread on Film Noir aesthetics and Thailand's Muay Thai:

I've been exploring ultrawides for a while, though basically drawn to them since I started shooting Muay Thai though I didn't know how to use them. There was always the sense that I wanted to weave together very different focal lengths. Since shooting with the Contax which I really love, on a bigger sensor format I've been drawn further in. So here is an experiment, using keyframes, big contrast video and telephoto images, to capture the mood and energy of a training session with Chatchai. This is was just a sketch from a single very quick shoot (I think 3 very short videos, maybe 100 still frames shot), maybe 5 minutes of photography altogether. I wanted it to be very bare bones to see if I could whip up an energy and feeling that I could maybe use on a larger project. The short is much aided by the music by Anand who I'm working with on a big, experimental writing project.

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Saw two spectacular movies I really didn't know. The Big Risk (1960) with Lino Ventura and Fassbinder's Love Is Colder Than Death (1969). Wow, both visually arresting.

The Big Risk full of vistas, framed out interiors, face portraiture, a beautiful serial on-the-run story that filled me with visual imagination.

Love is Colder Than Death has incredible blownout compositions with dark figures (scenes on white walls exposed to the black leather jackets, etc). Both have those Living Greys where grey becomes an unbelieveable White in the Mind's Eye.

We take photos because this little fragment of reality...matters. And the art of the camera, its alchemy, is applying rites, practices and crafts to that image to bring that meaningfulness forth. To just dump that carved piece of the REAL into a knowledge mill, into a vast encryption pulverization is just fundamentally wrong, and deprives the photograph of the very sort of sacred (yes, sacred) life it was given. This is a fundamental crisis...and deeply affects even how I relate to my own images, or even the desire to take them.

I've always felt that this problem is one of occasional aesthetics, that there must be forms out there, waiting to be created, which deny some aspects of this digital pulverization. (This I suppose are what galleries are for, or printed prints on walls in homes...to forestall the profanation.) This problem is absolutely unresolved, but...

This morning I began editing my photographs of Kru Hem at TDet99 from yesterday and the first two photographs really spoke to me. They spoke to me as a pair. Together, they held a symbolic form, I might say. So I asked myself, how in this digital time (I refuse Instagram...actually since my Instagram account suddenly vanished several years ago, for no reason at all, but also because its form for photographs is dead wrong), could I even present them as a Symbolic Form, as a Two? What would be in some sense homological to how it might be if they hung on a wall, framed, side by side? The question was a very simple one, one that instinctively felt had an answer...at least a partial answer. I imagined, just place them in relationship to themselves in video (video holding its own very serious, de-aestheticizing problems in the scroll), but do so using a feature that I believe is what made large screen cinema different. The secret to cinema's magic was that the size of the screen cannot be taken in in a single glance. The action may occur here or there, but there are always areas of the screen to explore, at any given moment in the flow of time. The viewing eye sculpts, as it selects attention, in the narrative. (This is something, a magic, that no longer operates within our world of small screens.)

I just entered one of these photos and selected out frames within the frame, and placed them in tempo with the overall frame, mimicking in part some of the nature of cinematic magic. I have no idea how or if this changes how the images may be received and experienced in various digital flows and scroll/refreshes, within the pulverization mill which grinds our attention, packaged for exchange in markets, but it DID change how I related to my photographs themselves. The process pulled me into them, and brought the pleasure of the large files I'm able to shoot with. I love exploring the worlds and pieces of worlds within a single frame, so it made me happy with my art, it changed the possible within it, rather than de-spiriting it.

Reading a few essays on Film Noir this boils down some of the core elements of the genre, at least in the classic sense:

I am just reaching out because I recently booked my first trip to Thailand this fall. I plan on training and fighting for the few months that I am there. My girlfriend and I would love to capture our private sessions and fights in high quality and also share an interest in photography. We would like to bite the bullet and purchase a camera for the trip, just something capable of capturing high quality images and video. I understand the lighting isn’t the best at a lot of these events. Are there any lenses I should purchase along with the camera? We don’t want anything overly complicated and would love if it fell into our budget of $1000 or less. With so many different brands and models and having never purchased a camera before it is a bit overwhelming. I am new here so if this is not the correct place for this post please let me know. Any recommendations or advice is greatly appreciated!

I began writing about this here, where the photo series is found: The Inner Grace - The Esoteric of Muay Thai Style

This is a continuation.

There is an incredible play of doubling in Luce Irigaray and Carolyn Burke's "When Our Lips Speak Together" which slides between the doubling of the Self and Other (a woman an her lover), and the Inner private Self, and our Outward public Self, which is brought together in the analogy of lips touching...and separating to speak a word. That impossible-eqse word is unknown. Perhaps it is "love" or "equals", but it's about the joining of the two. When the separate touch, as one, and then separate out to speak.

Some relevant excerpts:

And

There are some really beautiful things said about exteriority, and also about the internal experience of lips touching lips, the recursivity of the same, the joining together. These passages feel like to me that have taken the abstractions of a Philosophy and pressed them down into experiential physicality, all the while riding on a rich metaphor. I feel like this self-touching of creation is something that the camera can bring to fight photography - well, all photography of course, but the subject here is fight photography. Fights are so externalized, in an apparent sense. Seen as events of clashing. And fight styles signatured by mechanics of force and outward display. The temptation is always to grasp hold of the external and record it as a physicality. But, in photographing Kru Pern, for instance, I uncovered a different layer, one that I described (above) as esoteric. The inner techniques of self-touching and self-relation. I was pretty shocked to see it in the files. I felt something of it compositionally when framing shots, but on crop and edit the internal REAL leapt out. I feel like photography, fight photography in particular, can capture that intimate script, that quiet language, which lays like code and word beneath the outward form, which Irigaray and Burke says is "assuming one model after another, one master after another..."

The above photo is of Arjan Yai, instructing during a filming of a coming Muay Thai Library session. The photos that follow are also part of that photo series. What I'm interested in this post is the way shallow depth of field, and also lens "compression" (I know it's not a real thing) can be used in situational Muay Thai and other sports photography, to bring out the psychology of what is happening, and less the structure of a scene. In the above photo I'm struck by just how sculptural the face becomes, as the focus falls off, how the eyes and some features come forward, and dominant, expressing the emotional state of Arjan Yai. He's a proud man, speaks from authority, and somehow facially those aspects kind of float in the space in a really interesting and powerful way.

Below are other photos from the series, you can see how the depth of field plays out in those scenarios, what may be communicated. Of course shallow depth of field means many more misses than hits when photographing, which makes captures during sport contexts more precarious, but I think something important is possible in this.

You can see my photo essays, that are also examining this use of shallow depth of field here: Muaynoir Behance.

There is a very strange experience, drifting slowly through this photograph as the faces of the fighters and krus of the Dejrat Gym in the mid-90s. Just seeing the photo as it was on the wall would never elicit this feeling. Even standing before it, there is very little psychology, very little sense of individual histories. Rather, one might get a sense of a moment in history, this history, this gym. But, as the screen pulls across these faces the entire photograph opens up. You can see and feel the differing disposition of each man or boy, the qualities of their nature, as they face the hardness of the art and sport of Muay Thai. They are all differing materials, exposed to the same forceful wind. There is just such extraordinary variety and humanity here, revealed at this level of a view. In some ways, the documentation of a photograph can always give and bring more, than whatever we imagined of it. This photo has hung there, low on the wall, near the training ropes of the ring, for countless years. An anchor-point to a year back in time. But, here it becomes another kind of thing. A record, caught on a sliver of time, and somehow it all seems precious, and Muay Thai itself of that time feels precious. You can feel it eradiating.

Muay photography feels like it should do something like this. Because it is a historical form it should capture more than it seems to, capture in the sense of a net cast, not knowing completely what is in there. We are documenting more than events, or physical dynamics. We are capturing times, and because it is an art, we are capturing times that are layered, sedimented with other times.  We do not even know all the things that are in our pictures.

This is the original photo:

This photo is also part of my photo essay Chatchainoi: The Man of Stone

Above are cover photos for six of my photo essays that are now on Behance. You can see my profile and them here. I've written a Twitter thread on why I made this move to Behance, and what its taught me as a photographer, you can read that thread unrolled here (quick screenshot below). It tells a bit of my story of how my Instagram account just completely vanished one day, with no recourse or even a real explanation, something that gave me to try Behance, and Adobe sharing platform for artists. My experience with Behance opened up larger thoughts about photography in the digital age.

One of the great challenges of a photographer, whose work is essentially to freeze time, lock it up in a frame, is that increasingly the life of the work then depends on putting that frozen chunk of Time into a faster and faster moving stream. Perhaps that was always the case, if we thinking about the stream of capital, investment and flows of photography commerce, but the work itself once lived, presented, in isolated places. In books, or in galleries and shows if fortunate. The frozen moment lived selected out, in a fixed place, a viewing context. Sometimes this was part of stories being told, in a magazine article, flipped between pages, or in a Newspaper, but the frame's relationship to stasis, a fundamental aspect of what Photography is, felt primary.

With social media stream becoming a fundamental dissemination and viewing experience this relationship to stasis has changed. And it becomes a real challenge to give your selected out stills a place withing the living stream. Right now Behance's storyboad-like projects are really interesting. Not so much as final homes, but in a way the creation of your own gallery, which could become a dialogue in editing.

A secondary path I've experimented with is using video to then create a more personalized stream, in the sense of recording a viewing experience in Behance. You can see one of this shorts here. Tempo and timing is introduced into the presentation, without submitting the images to the rushing waters of a social media platform, which is pretty counterproductive aesthetically:

It feels as if Photographers will need to creatively engage digital possibilities in order to create the kinds of spaces, the kinds of relationships to stasis, that are necessary for the character of their craft. We need to find boxed frames and small streamed experiences which bring out the stasis we create. I ran into this very interesting one called Spatial on the Apple app store. It's a digital gallery I believe oriented toward NFTs, but open to non-NFT work. It recreates the viewer experience of a gallery, remarkably delivering the concrete aspects of a digital version of art (change of angle, atmospherics, changes in light, etc) in a virtual way. Here we can see how stasis and flow (and viewer agency) can work together. A screenshot of Tweets of a digital artist I follow:

For photographers of action, like fight action, this kind of kinetic representation makes even more sense, as the images are displayed in a volume and the viewer is given and almost bodily agency over the view. Also, the richness of increasing powers of resolution that are coming to photography are given a space to breathe, instead of compressed into a tiny square. The aesthetics of size are embraced, which matters a great deal when even thinking about the sale of photography and it's place in personal and public spaces. Because photographers freeze time, how people experience photographs in relationship to Time becomes of paramount importance to just what photography is.

Which called to mind my photo of Sawsing Sor Sopit between rounds in a fight (you can find that photo here: https://www.muaynoir.com/Prints/i-2Nn5Svg/A ):

Why are these photos so satisfying? At least to me. They reach into what really matters in fighting, and therefore of fighter photography. I see so much difference in the humanity of these two legendary fighting women, the ways in which they summon themselves, a great reserve truly more beautiful than a perfectly landed cross or head kick. This is what is spectacular in fighting.

I'm kind of mesmerized by this photo. I knew I had it the moment I hit the shutter. I took several more to be sure, but sometimes the subject and the device just connect. You can see a higher res version of the photo here: https://www.muaynoir.com/Prints/i-z63TzJ3/A

What I wanted to think about in this post though was the way that black and white, and that old school luminescence can bring an incredible throwback feeling that feels important with older legends of the sport. Muay Thai is, in the end, in Thailand a performance and capture of masculinity. As Muay Thai changes and bows to the pressures of the the west/global aggro fighting, so does the masculinity being portrayed. This photo just seems to throw me back into another time. Pudpadnoi fought his first fight in 1965. He assumes this aura even at the age of 70. The things we can bring about in our edits have huge aesthetic ramifications, because they help us see things in a different way. The men, the sport.

https://www.instagram.com/pap_muay_thai/

This isn't the only style he shoots in, but for fight photography he has really pushed and explored this look. Just scrolling through his feed you can see it develop subtly, which is cool. You get that graphic novel ripping muscle thing, truly luminant figures against black backgrounds. In general I really resist the Sweat Spray look, mostly because it hides all the deeper emotions and efforts in what fighting is all about. And because it tends to be produced by machine gunning the shutter and then just picking out the best "moment" (which in itself is a process, but not something that feels good to me). That being said, it is very difficult to shoot fights. You are usually locked into only one or two positions on the ring, and its hard to get expressiveness to action. Moving toward comic book cell aesthetics has its advantages, and going in that direction his look is pretty cool. I include this here because it occupies a space on the aesthetic spectrum of what fighting is, and how to communicate it. That it is coming out of a Thai sensibility in the history of aesthetics makes it all the more interesting.

One of the most compelling influences for Muay Thai photography can come from cinema. Instead of the "sports reporter" history of fight photography, I believe we should draw on the much wider language of cinematic expression. It's roots lie very deep in our subconscious, and evocations of light and color languages open up worlds of the possible when trying to grasp not only a sport, but a culture. That is one reason why I've been studying the films (and thinking) of cinematographer Roger Deakins. His Sicario, Blade Runner 2049, No Country for Old Men have a lot to teach and share. What is cool is that Roger Deakins has a podcast with his wife James, so it isn't just on the level of images that one can dialogue with him.

One of the things that he makes clear is that he himself is inspired by still photographers, and one in particular he keeps returning to...Alex Webb. Above his a collection of his images from The Suffering of Light.

Deakins is clearly taken by what he imagines is the highly constructed nature of Alex Webb's frames. So much tension, juxtaposition, and layering. You can see all of it above, frames within frames, staggering of space. This is what was thinking of when I advocated for wide-lens photography for Muay Thai, the idea of spatial, situational inclusion, instead of just the "hero frame", as Brad Pitt calls it. What Alex invites is the staggering of space, so that the eye pinballs through the frame, forward and back. Many of his photos are beautifully jagged.

What is kind of interesting is how Deakins mis-imagines Webb's process, something he has thought long and hard about in his own artist fantasy. He seemed to picture Webb being very precise, kind of constructing the frame in advance, and then squeezing off a few precious photos, whereas Webb insists that he shoots prodigiously, lots and lots of frames, and that he only senses the possibility of the shot. It isn't until he looks later at what he has does he fully know if he got it. This is just a very interesting juxtaposition of influences. Deakins (cinematographically) looks at the finished project of Webb's (still photography) process, inspired by that perfect balance of tension, space and color, and then (I imagine) goes about constructing his own shots, in a much more controlled way. This seems like the inverse relationship between still photography (street) and cinematography. Webb using the frame to hunt, using his developed instincts, where as Deakins builds the frame in his mind, and then duplicates it in (dynamic) diaoramic practice.

You can listen to their discussion here:

https://www.rogerdeakins.com/team-deakins-podcast/episode-30-alex-webb-stills-photographer/

I really like this photo treatment of photographer Walt Zink. One of the challenges of selective color is connecting the color aesthetically to the rest of the lighting of the photo. A lot of time for me it can be jarring, taking me out of the photo, but in photos like these there is a real community of color that not only creates focus, but also aura. You get the continuity of tone, the feeling of adornment, that Old School atmosphere of parchment maybe. Very cool.

Here we instructively have a subject which one would think would involve capturing "Speed" - just as we are challenged to capture the "fight", but instead are presented with lunar reality, the superb isolation, the "way of life" even of the track racer, depicted in so many textures, grits, "near monochrome". It is radient. I came upon this in this article on cinematography, telling of the inspiration for the film Arrival:

Quote

One source of inspiration for Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi film was Scandinavian photographer Martina Ivanow, specifically her nearly monochromatic Speedway series about speedway racing. "The photographs are stylized in some ways, but very subdued and natural and dark and mysterious. Not darkness as not seeing, but darkness as pathology. The darkness is deeply psychological," Young has said, adding that he and Villeneuve wanted Arrival to be "dark in a way that makes us a little uncomfortable." Color was used strategically as a contrast to that darkness. "It was never really a striking palette — like, these are the colors you're working with," said Young.

read it here

As a sidenote, I stumbled upon this reference studying cinematographers to inform my photography, where here the cinematography is inspired by the photography. A swimming dialectic. I'm truly moved by what I see in film, it makes me want to press my shutter.  

The first photo in the series, the suited up portrait, is just amazing. Damn. That steely palette, the solitary oranges that they took for Arrival. In this, I think we can learn - open our eyes really - to all the tools we can use to bring to bear on what fighting IS. It's not strikes landing. In fact, it's probably much more strikes missing, than it is strikes landing. Posted here as reference, and for discussion.

What is principal here for me are all the ways that slowing down footage actually works to produce motion. It is all this micro-motion, which for me is like a kind of breathing, as if the form itself is breathing, that I find really interesting. This...and how color grading can work to building up atmosphere, a materiality of space, out of which the depicted form or focus emerges, is cloistered in, or erupts. This is something I seek in lots of my still photography. It's why I often try wider lenses. I feel like Muay Thai photography, and videography as well, has extracted too much from the surrounding nature, mechanizing it, alienating it, making an fragmentation. These video experiments are in that direction.