Whitewash

Whitewash is Harit Srikhao's first monograph, and it turns a teenage memory of state violence into a body of staged, symbolically loaded photographs rather than a documentary account.

Srikhao was a student in Bangkok during the 2010 military crackdown on Red Shirt protesters, known as Black Saturday, and was unable to see through the government propaganda surrounding the event at the time. Years later he returned to that memory not through reportage but through elaborately staged tableaux that borrow from Thai religious iconography, fetish fantasy and popular ritual, restaging violence, nationalism and control as a kind of costumed performance. The resulting pictures use color, artifice and theatrical staging to question the shared idea of reality among Thai citizens and the use of images as tools of social control.

Published by Akina Books as a spiral-bound first edition, the book established Srikhao as one of the notable photographers to emerge from Thailand in the years following the protests. His method departs from straightforward photojournalism toward invented, symbolic restaging of political trauma.