When his beloved Canon 60D started acting up and giving Nanut Thanapornrapee “cracked” photographs and images of poor quality, the artist, instead of throwing out his camera, thought that he should do something to pay tribute to it. The DSLR camera had served him well for seven years after all.
N01SE.JPEG, as much as it is an ode to a cherished camera, is also an exhibition that reveals the photographic “noise” or flaws that usually appear when a digital camera fails to do its job in accurately evaluating and recording a subject.
Digital noise or dead pixels usually manifest as indecipherable speck-like elements on a photo. There are ways to avoid their appearance; more advanced cameras, in fact, are equipped with technology that eliminates these dead pixels.
For this exhibition, however, Nanut renders digital noise as valuable, and set his camera at 12800 ISO or the “maximum light value” to capture surreal-looking images that play up the presence of these dark dead pixels. He also explains that the presence of noise on an image may reveal when a camera was produced, representing the photographic technology of its time.