Portrait Of A Man In Habit Analysis

Portrait of a Man in Habit I depicts Shaowanasai in his Buddhist monk garment, holding on to a peculiarly placed pink child-like, “girlish” handkerchief, with his face fully made up with feminine make up. The portrait is a stark presentation of his true reality, as a practicing Buddhist and a gay man. This image practices Cotton’s description of “Deadpan Aesthetics” in portraits, which is one of the most prominent and frequently used styles of photography. The deadpan aesthetics describes as a cool and detached type of photography, in which the photographer’s emotions and command is detached. But although the photographer himself is the subject in this photo, his expression is neutral and it is a great challenge to decipher his emotions here. We can only draw clues from his body language and clothes.

In creating the portrait, Shaowanasai was questioning the inhabitation of these seemingly contradictory notions (of being Buddhist and a homosexual) in a singular body. In presenting his two identities into a single picture, the result was explosive. The first, larger portrait was first exhibited in Bangkok before media controversy and protests by the Thai Buddhist Association led to Shaowanasai responding by exhibiting the photograph rolled to the point that it was no longer visible.

Subsequently, the image was replaced with a smaller …show more content…
She describes how photographers make conscious decisions to highlight the physical and material nature of photography and are responding to the changing modes of photographic dissemination. Chong acts as the curator, investing new meaning into the found images that were probably mere documentation of the police force – and it is through the aesthetics of the image that these new meanings were constructed. Here, the truth is formulated and “re- documented” through what happens to the documentation through the passing of