Glass Plate Negatives: Circles of Centres
Drawing from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, this exhibition doesn’t just show photographs – it asks what it means to truly see them. Memory and mourning hover in the margins, where light has fossilised time. At its centre stands King Chulalongkorn, not as a distant monarch but as a man navigating the tremors of modernity. The glass plate images – sepia-tinted, fragile – follow his travels from Bangkok through the far reaches of Siam, down into the southern sultanates and beyond, each frame a quiet assertion of presence in the shadow of looming empire. But this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reframing. Through the photographic gaze, the exhibition invites reflection on how history is captured, archived, then inevitably softened. What remains when the image outlasts the moment? And who does the remembering?
Until July 27. Free. Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 10am-8pm