• Code:  02-034
• Publisher: Picador USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• ISBN: 0312420099

Intro: In an essay for ‘Choose to move’ exhibition, author Quyen Bao quoted from the book ‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag to talk about the artworks by the artist Orawan Arunrak. Indeed, this is a very important book discussing image-related practice or observation, no matter if you are visual artist, photographer, art historian, anthropologist, journalist, advertiser, and portrait painter… It is also very helpful for anyone who would love to understand more profoundly other artworks in this exhibition. This book provides sharp arguments on the authenticity and the abuse of image, about the ambiguous bounds between the reality and the arrangement in the image, the relationship among the subject, the object and the camera, and the capacity of photography manipulating the audience.

Quote: ‘Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world; and the two uses are complementary. Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.

[…] War and photography now seem inseparable, and plane crashes and other horrific accidents always attract people with cameras.’ (p. 167)