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The Nation's Web Special:
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20- Thailand embraces new invention: photography
Oct 21, 2004
Among their many novel gifts to the people of Siam, Christian missionaries also brought photography, with the French bishop Pallegoix displaying his camera during the Third Reign – and provoking more fright than interest.
Most Siamese were afraid that the camera would steal their souls until the always-prepared King Rama IV allowed his photograph to be taken. He even established a royal photography department within his court.
According to a 1905 edition of the Sayam Prabhet newspaper, the country’s first native photographer was Pallegoix’s student, Phraya Kasapkijkosol, also known as Mode Amatayakul. Already a skilled artisan in bronze and gold, he took to the new medium quickly, and was soon followed by Phra Preechakolkarn and Luang Akaneenaruemitr, who is best known today as Chit Chitrakanee.
Sayam Prabhet reported that the first photograph any Siamese had seen was sent to the court of King Rama III by the ruler of Saiburi (Malaysia’s present-day Kedah state).
It was a picture of Britain’s Queen Victoria at age 18. King Rama III assumed, like everyone else, that it was a painting, but Bishop Pallegoix, leader of Siam’s Catholic community, soon demonstrated the difference. He introduced photography here just a few years after the French inventor Louis Daguerre left the world dumbstruck with his “daguerreotype” in 1839. King Rama IV allowed a photographer (whose name was not recorded) to snap his photo alongside Queen Dhepsirindhara Boromrajini, although the process was so time-consuming that there was no “snapping” involved. The royal image was sent to US President Franklin Pierce on June 10, 1856, and is now kept at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute.
Photography became quite popular here by the late Fourth Reign. In 1863, Chit Chitrakanee became the first Siamese to open a photography salon, which was called Francis Chit & Sons. He welcomed clients and the curious to the shop at his Bangkok home on the Chao Phya River in front of Santa Cruz Church.
Chit was also the first professional photographer to advertise his skills and wares in newspapers, including the Bangkok Recorder and the Siam Mercantile Gazette. He had a pair of rivals also advertising, but neither A Zagler nor J Thompson ever settled in Siam.
Chit, who had studied with Pallegoix’s missionary colleagues, was later appointed royal photographer to King Rama IV. He continued working in the court, serving King Rama V as well, until his death. The Sayam Prabhet reported on January 20, 1899 that Chit was ordered to accompany King Rama IV to Prachuap Khiri Khan province to photograph the solar eclipse of August 18, 1868, and under the monarch who followed, Chit also travelled to Burma and India in 1871.
Chit photographed thousands places and people, from high personages to ordinary folk, and sold them widely. Among his most famous images are a series on criminal executions in Nakhon Chaisi (present-day Nakhon Pathom). He was also the first professional photographer to use official seals for his shop, charmingly archaic devices in a changing world that called out the names “F Chit Photographer Sta Cruz Bangkok” and “Chit & Sons Siam Bangkok”.
Nithinand Yorsaengrat
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