I think I’m homesick ฉันว่าฉันคิดถึงบ้าน

Warisara Thomson

a response by Georgia Carr for PhotoForum

I think I’m homesick ฉันว่าฉันคิดถึงบ้าน, by Warisara Thomson วริศรา ทอมสัน is a memory exploration of a homeland – remotely and locally captured, archived and re-presented as printed matter.

The photobook is a desirable type of artwork, its ability to be collected and displayed alongside other books and publications can create connections through their content and ideas. Books also show a viewer an individual's way of looking, through the photographer (and screen shooter’s) eye. This paired with the use of Google Street View, narrows down this looking and layers it with a loose narrative. Photobooks have a way of miniaturising and grouping work together – transporting the images to new places. In this case, away from the screen. There is an enjoyable balance between the glitched screenshots and the satin print of the book. Separated from their connecting Google view point, the images become frozen forever in time and resolution. The book as an object both pays homage both to its content as well as its process.

Throughout I think I’m homesick, text in both Thai and English describes and documents personal memories, often tied to locations of Thomson’s childhood, growing up in (small town) Ban Chang บ้านฉาง, Thailand. The title leads the book with a slight sense of forgetting – hesitations to bring up memories that are ‘not-quite’, or distant enough that they seem only vaguely real but important enough to remember.

Thomson describes Phayun Beach หาดพยูน as: “painfully average, painfully average but yet, so perfect.” This language — unglamorous and strictly normal, talks us through the usual yet appreciated experiences of her home country. Within the book’s structure, the text sits as small inserts within the book, they conceal and reveal new areas of images in front and behind, they are as much a part of the book as the images. To see the images with the text is to see the story and to ignore them as a pair is to disregard an additional translation of the past.  

The images capture locations throughout Ban Chang บ้านฉาง significant to Thomson, introduced through screenshots from Google Maps, family pictures and cell phone call dial logs. The distance created through the web-based images locates the reader in front of a computer screen, a phone, a family album and a book. I think I’m homesick ฉันว่าฉันคิดถึงบ้าน sits as a midpoint, referencing how the internet both connects and separates us; it is both an appreciation of places past, and the heartbreak of food, memories and lost friends. James Bridle writes about this bridging of worlds: “the physical world is bound on fewer sides than we believe; other worlds are possible. In attempting to map the virtual, we map ourselves, and find that we contain multitudes.”[1]

Screenshots as images secure memories of place through Google’s machinic, surveillance-like photo documentation of the world. Belgrade based poet and editor Maša Seničić describes these images as “narratives of the past that people ignorantly refused to capture on camera, thinking that the mundane, ephemeral leisure of everyday life would never vanish”[2]. Google has become our voyage of locational archive traversing. But what's a tour without a guide? The screenshots within I think I’m homesick ฉันว่าฉันคิดถึงบ้าน, position readers to see a time and location in digital exactness. When images of the screen are separated from their source, their connection and interactive use-point is removed. Not only are significant and meaningful moments pointed out throughout the pages of the book, but anomalies of the screen feature as visual descriptions of prosaic encounters, both physical and digital.

Thomson’s attention to Google's Street View image quality needs to be mentioned as the images on the website are in constant flux. Street View hosts multiple time frames of mostly every location – they sink into one another like ghosts of the future and of the past. These stretched, censored and poor-quality images form large quilts of spaces where we want to view, where Thomson has suggested that we look. Hito Steyerl famously writes that the poor image “...mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.”[3] And while Google's Street View is created using high quality cameras and technology, its output has a certain and recognisable low quality (as of now).

The hierarchy of image resolution is always at play within the photographic and wider art world. The screenshot as image is perceived as easy to make and appropriative of digital media, but still requires intent and artistic consideration. As screens populate our reality, the screenshot feels like a static stare at what would normally change or move, it appears as a singular of something much larger, like a window into its own universe. In this way, the screenshot captures and displays one's way of looking or browsing, more so than the more considered photograph — the screen doesn’t only hold images, but layers of data, information, locations, text, images and memories.

Thomson knows all of this. The magic of the book is that she is able to balance the disintegrating, fleeting digital moments with a poignant and poetic exploration of a place that may never be completely present in the way she thought it might be.

Georgia Carr is a picture maker and digital artist. Her work investigates the cyber-self through digital and printed platforms, often centring on the internet and its rendering and mirroring of physical space. She has self-published a number of photo books that explore analogue and digital manipulation.

[1] "On the Virtual | NGV," NGV, accessed October 30, 2023, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition_post/on-the-virtual/.

[2] Maša Seničić, “Visible Cities,” in PrtScn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot, ed. Laurence Scherz, Chloë Arkenbout (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2022), 80-81.

[3] "In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10." e-flux. Accessed October 30, 2023. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

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