The Inner Form of Muay Thai Brought Out By The Camera

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

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..."