The Photographic Assemblage: An alternative experience of the migration of labourers in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Abstract

This practice-led research considers the lives and places of migrant labourers in Chiang Mai, Thailand, by examining the medium of photography and how it shapes the experience of migration itself. Current patterns of photographic dissemination employed by the Thai state and media are restrictive and cannot cope with the complexity of a large migrant population in constant flux, often adversely affecting all those involved. Within this context, my project explores the limits and potential of photography as a medium that binds together disparate entities, distant origins, and immediate locales. By better understanding what photography is and what it can do, it constructs alternative visibilities of such experiences and points toward photography's potential in accommodating more informed processes of migration and connections with surroundings.

This research makes several original contributions to understandings of photography and migration. It documents the historical and everyday lives of my participants: the migrant workers, as well as our collaborative photographic processes and the resulting works exhibited in Thailand and Australia. These elements are presented as sequences and constellations within an artist book that serves as the creative component of this thesis. The other significant contribution is the conception of the photographic assemblage, developed through my creative practice before being theorised through strands drawn from Ariella Azoulay, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. It pluralises the photographic process as a political space of negotiation between heterogeneous components and participants, both human and nonhuman, and provides a diagram of how differing photographic elements enter into specific relations when an event of photography is initiated. The conception first emerged through my investigation into how photography mediated a hierarchical encounter between myself and the migrant participants in the context of local news reportage and the registration of migrant labourers by the Thai government in Chiang Mai. After experimenting with and reconfiguring photographic forms within the space of encounter, my practice was informed by Azoulay's political ontology of photography, which contextualises photography's relationality, accentuates its political potential, and extends photography beyond the photograph and the authorship of the photographer. As I engaged more deeply with the materiality of photographic processes, I drew on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the assemblage to reformulate Azoulay's notion of plurality into a more horizontal formulation; allowing the physical, material, nonhuman dimensions of photography to have their own diverging trajectories outside linguistic and cultural systems of signification and meaning, including the very concept of photography itself, complicating any overly simplistic and restrictive view of the experience of migration and the migrant person. Show more