{"id":2435,"date":"2010-05-20T14:53:23","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T14:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/?p=2435"},"modified":"2013-06-04T15:05:42","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T15:05:42","slug":"agnes-dherbeys-on-thailand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/agnes-dherbeys-on-thailand\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look Back at Agnes Dherbeys’ work on Thai Political Turmoil"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"dherbeys_280\"After eight years living in her adopted home of Thailand, Agn\u00e8s Dherbeys\u2019 decision to consolidate her assignment work, and to take a more focused look at the political turmoil that intermittently threatens to engulf the country and its people, marks an important development for an interesting picture-maker.<\/p>\n

Dherbeys moved to Thailand from France in 2001 and has also photographed in Nepal, East Timor and Cambodia. Increasingly, her work has been charged with the kind of energy and reflection that can only be born out of a period of extreme change. \u201cIt\u2019s back to basics for me, now,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a time to question everything, myself, my photography. I definitely reached the point where I didn\u2019t know what I wanted to do anymore, or even what I liked. Now I\u2019m figuring out what I want and how to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early on in our conversation, I start to sense what it is that drives 32-year-old Dherbeys, and it\u2019s best summed up for now as \u201cpure feeling\u201d. As her photographic style matures, there are clues that it will become significant for its emotionality, in the way of a D\u2019Agata or an Ackerman, yet her gaze may well retain the aesthetic that is referred to in shorthand as \u201cphotojournalistic\u201d. It is difficult to draw her precisely on how her image-making might develop, as the conversation becomes quickly and passionately infused with the subject matter, politics and the ethics of style. \u201cI shot them just as news pictures, you know, as stock. But I have realised that given what might happen in Thailand over the next few years, they might make better sense.\u201d She\u2019s sure of one crucial aspect, however: \u201cWithin the coming months, I would like to put a face to these abstract powers, raise questions and if not give answers, at least provide clues and tracks to be further debated and followed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through work undertaken for Newsweek<\/em>, Dherbeys has accumulated a significant portfolio that encompasses news events in Thai politics. If it has a starting point, it could be fixed at the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in 2006, which saw Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ousted by his own military while he was away in New York for a UN meeting. Dherbeys was visiting Paris when the coup took place and so flew in from there to cover the turbulent scenes. The decision to shoot in black and white was entirely pragmatic:<\/p>\n

\u201cI was shooting only in negative, and at the time we didn\u2019t know how the situation was going to play out. If I shot in colour I may not have been able to print the films and send the pictures so I could do everything from home if I shot in black and white.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the observer, the mix of colour work and black and white adds to the sense of turmoil that Dherbeys wants to portray. \u201cI am profoundly convinced now is the turning point of Thai history,\u201d she says. Thaksin\u2019s rule leading up to the coup was characterised by its infamous and ruthless \u201cwar on drugs\u201d. His government adopted what was effectively a shoot to kill policy in relation to drug dealers, a policy which left hundreds dead, including babies and children, and did little or nothing to stem the country\u2019s vast drug problem. While the official reasons for the coup are still quite opaque, Thaksin\u2019s increasingly totalitarian grip on power provoked the move for change. <\/p>\n

Though Dherbeys says her work does not aim to analyse the political turmoil, she describes her work as a need to understand the country with her own eyes, during a time when the twin peaks of information and knowledge are restricted. \u201cThe climate of auto-censorship and lack of critical debate about current Thai events, are precisely the reasons why I feel totally compelled into witnessing and documenting today\u2019s society,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Dherbeys has captured many of the events that have brought the world\u2019s attention to Thailand in recent years, from the 2006 coup, to the Red Shirt protests earlier this year, when thousands of largely pro-Thaksin supporters took to the streets of Bangkok, demanding a return to the former leader\u2019s \u201cdemocracy\u201d and insisting that the new regime was illegally installed. The new Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva\u2019s security forces called the victory theirs as protesters were eventually dispersed, yet the precarious and increasingly polarised situation that prevails in a country once known for its harmony benefits no one. <\/p>\n

The opposing forces are the Yellow Shirts, whose street protests led to Thaksin\u2019s deposal in 2006 and who wear that colour to show their allegiance to the King. Their leader Sondhi Limthongkul survived an assassination attempt earlier this year. Dherbey\u2019s has also photographed the \u201cDay of Change\u201d in South Thailand, perhaps the most politically unstable and volatile region.<\/p>\n

The wider work that Dherbeys wants to make will draw together these seemingly chaotic events, connecting them with a thread through history, and, importantly, framing them through a uniquely Thai mentality, that of extreme veneration for the King of Thailand, 81-year-old King Bhumibol, whose reign remains a fundamentally unifying and stabilising force. The monarch seems to embody a very specific type of nationalism that any Thai leader would be keen to exploit. It\u2019s this sense of national identity that Dherbeys will be seeking to capture, in part through a series of portraits. She is still wrestling with the idea of achieving a coherent visual style for this aspect of the project, but mentions an earlier series of photographs, taken in Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu, the so-called \u201cAids Temple\u201d, as a possible visual template.<\/p>\n

Dherbeys knows that part of her project will necessitate heading south. She talks of the difficulties of representing such complex political situations, wary of perpetuating Western stereotypes of a seething hotbed of Islamic insurgents. Rather than trying to cover news events, she wants to take a different approach, again taking Thai identity as her subject.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuccessive governments are trying to impose a kind of identity on the region that is not really Thai. Their culture is Malay and predominantly Muslim. I think it\u2019s incredible that the government thinks it can compel them towards a particular identity \u2013 maybe that is not the right word \u2013 but try to control them like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dherbeys thinks she may well begin by shooting portraits, maybe of a teacher or a doctor she knows, to try to provide some kind of entry to the complex story. When asked if she has a fixed idea of how she wants to shoot the portraits, she says no and it\u2019s clear that such a preordained series would be anathema to Dherbeys, whose endeavour is precisely to explore the world with her camera. If she already knew what she was looking for, she wouldn\u2019t be able to find it. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never been a fighter for a cause,\u201d she insists, yet on hearing the strength of desire to understand the causes that underpin the political turmoil that she has lived through, I wonder if she is on her way to being exactly that. The cause would be communication itself.<\/p>\n