What makes up our realities as city-dwellers? How might high-resolution photography help us piece reality together? Wut Chalanant from Chiangmai has made the landscape of Northern Thailand and other countryside areas – where ecological degradation and corporate control over land and farming industries are live issues – the subject of his investigation for the last two years. His photographs beckon us to pore over their exhaustive features, and function both to disclose and explore the effects of human and commercial activity, as if the visual detail could cleave into our consciousness what actually happens in correspondence with ‘development’.

These photographs serve to impact on one’s body such that awareness takes root not just in the mind as a dawning visual and mental realization, but also immediately and powerfully as a physical response. Though the concerns are ecological and social, most thought-provoking is when the visual results are more absurd than devastating – mines turned into picturesque lakes, rubble and rubbish strewn down a magnificent man-made cliff, or encroaching farmland harassing a rainforest into retreating to a lonely hill. The picturesque or dramatic landscape that makes us sigh or gasp is revealed on closer examination to be a consequence of large-scale corporate activity over time on nature – or of nature over time on such activity; the answer is not usually clear-cut.

Even more peculiar, is how, while apparently documentary in ethos and appearance, these are not ‘real’ scenes made from a large format film camera. Only a rather mobile, digital high-resolution camera is used. Photoshop techniques are minimal, but the numerous frames that make up one picture are selected from and represent different moments. A sense of majesty, timelessness and stillness results, paradoxically, from what are constantly-moving shrubs, fireflies, motorized vehicles etc. On exhibition, these are pictures that invite re-photographing – compose one’s own landscape from a section thereof or picture oneself in (front) of it. The potential of Chalanant’s pictures are these vagaries between times, realities and perspectives that exist in parallel, which incite relooking and renewed perceptions.

Text by Isabel Ching