A photographic essay/film - In Praise of The Gambler

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

One of the struggles of photography in today's incredibly fragmenting but also homogenizing digital age is how to tell stories, convey ideas, through still images. One can stand out from other types through unique lenses or even camera choices, but also the form of expression itself is often extremely platform-determined. Feeds on Instagram feed people. In the film short of still photographs above I'm experimenting with some of my priors. I want to use telephoto lenses to penetrate contexts, and get in touch with the very affects of a fighting scene. I'm usually focused on fighters in this way, but in this case it's a ringside gambler at a provincial festival show. Aside from his face, it really was his shifting, expressive hands which seemed to work in a secret language (invoking gambling signalling itself, but really was a close-to-the-vest unconscious reaction to everything happening in the ring), that called this short into being. Successive images somewhat breakdown by also simultaneously participate in a "film" meaning, I think allowing still photography a certain avenue of reading it wouldn't otherwise have. The sound track and the spare, poem-ish voiceover work in two directions, against each other some I think, providing a frame for the images...and allow me to give some conceptual focus to the images. My overall theory is really that the bodies of gamblers are participating with the bodies of the fighters in very significant mirroring ways...and this mirroring is central to the production of traditional Muay Thai itself. 

You can see the theory argued here:

 

As this is a Muay Thai photography subforum, I share this example as a way that I am trying to push for a certain degree of photographic communication that seems almost impossible now. There are no real gallery walls on which photographs will stop-motion-frame express themselves. There are no magazines whose glossy pages will flip and say something. As photographers we need to discover/invent new ways of linking photographs together for a renewed perception of the uniqueness of what a photograph is...the way that it slices life off into a single, graspable, eternal form, that doesn't want to be lost.