RITE&RED DREAM
year 2011 / 2012Much has been shared on the political violence of 2010, but Harit Srikhao’s unique photographic perspective, with its on-rushing, vibrant immediacy, is born of direct impact.
Barely 15 then, he spent a long, emotionally-charged day trying to get home from school.
Because of the shooting around Zeer Rangsit shopping mall near his house, buses
were not running. Deciding to spend the night at a friend’s house, a 10-km walk away,
he trudged on through the descending night, passing gangs of teenage runaways,
prostitutes, packs of stray dogs.
Yes, he got lost; it was a nightmare that continues to plague his sleep to this day.
Two years on, he returned to the route, retracing his steps, compiling a photographic record which he calls his ‘Red Dream’.
The result is powerful, saturated with intense degrees of dread and fear, a questioning uncertainty towards everything being encountered
; the viewer gets caught up in his nightmarish adventures.
Harit is serious, mature for his age.
The first among his friends to know what he is going to be
— not a doctor, as he once dreamed, but a photographer
— Harit joined a workshop at the Angkor Photo Festival in Siemreap in 2011.
This resulted in the spell-binding series, ‘Black Rites’: street kids in Cambodia
from the perspective of an equal, not through the eyes of an adult.
There is no stigmatizing, no judgement; only understanding.
It is as if they are actually self-portraits through which his soul is gazing out
from the faces of these street children.
As he says: “The way I see it, we are the victims of the problem
, the tell-tale proof that this society is in trouble.”
- Introduction by Kathmandu Photo Gallery Bangkok
