In June 2026, I presented my paper, Environmental Portraiture as Counter-Documentation: Creative Communities and Heritage in Contemporary Thailand, at the Silpakorn University International Conference in Total Art and Science (SICTAS 2026), held at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
The paper emerged from an ongoing photographic project that I had been developing across Thailand, now titled Among Creatives. Through environmental portraits, conversations and repeated encounters, the project looks at the people who sustain creative practices and the places, relationships and communities that make those practices possible.
Writing the paper became an opportunity to step outside the immediate process of photographing and ask a different question: what kind of knowledge can a portrait project produce?
From photographic practice to research
The project began quite intuitively. I was interested in meeting creative practitioners and photographing them within the environments where their work and everyday lives intersect.
Over time, however, the accumulation of encounters began to reveal something larger. Studios, homes, workshops, shops, galleries and shared spaces were not simply backgrounds to the portraits. They were part of the story. So were the relationships between people, informal creative networks, questions of location, and the different ways practitioners sustain their work.
For the SICTAS paper, I began considering environmental portraiture as a form of counter-documentation: a way of building a record of contemporary creative life through individual encounters rather than through institutions, official histories or conventional definitions of cultural heritage. At the time of writing, the research drew from more than 90 collaborative portrait sessions with creative practitioners in Thailand.
A collaborative approach to portraiture
An important part of the project is the relationship between photographer and participant. Rather than approaching each session with a predetermined image in mind, I begin by asking participants what they would like to be seen for. The resulting portraits develop through conversation, observation and decisions made during the encounter.
The environment is equally important. The photographs often include objects, architecture, workspaces, neighbourhoods and other elements connected to a person’s practice. These details provide another layer of information beyond the face itself.
This approach led me to think more carefully about participant agency. Portraiture inevitably involves interpretation, and the photographer remains responsible for framing and editing the final image. Collaboration does not remove that imbalance, but it can make the process more transparent and allow the person being photographed to influence how they enter the visual record.
Creative communities as living heritage
One of the questions that emerged while writing the paper concerned the idea of heritage itself. Creative culture is often documented through finished works, recognised institutions or established artists. Yet much of a creative ecosystem exists elsewhere: in small studios, temporary spaces, friendships, independent initiatives, teaching, collaboration, informal economies and everyday routines. Environmental portraiture can make some of these less visible structures perceptible.
A portrait of a practitioner therefore becomes more than a record of an individual. When accumulated across many encounters, the photographs begin to map relationships between people, places and forms of creative activity.
The archive becomes a way of asking who contributes to contemporary culture, how they sustain their practice, and what forms of creative life might otherwise remain undocumented.
Presenting the research
Translating a long-term photographic project into a short academic presentation was a useful challenge in itself. Photography allows ambiguity. Academic writing asks for definitions, questions, methodology and arguments. Moving between the two made me examine assumptions that I had previously approached through instinct and practice.
The presentation also required me to select a relatively small number of images from a much larger body of work and consider what each photograph was actually demonstrating. Some illustrated collaboration, others the importance of environment, while others revealed relationships between creative practice and place. This process changed the way I looked at my own archive. I began seeing the photographs not only as individual portraits, but as interconnected pieces of a larger body of research.
Reflection
Developing the SICTAS paper was an important step in considering my photographic practice as a form of research. It pushed me to articulate questions that had previously emerged more intuitively through making portraits, particularly around collaboration, representation, place and the everyday realities of sustaining a creative practice in Thailand.
Writing also made me reflect more critically on my own position as a photographer and on the relationships I establish with participants. Ideas such as participation, agency and counter-documentation gave me a vocabulary for examining decisions that had previously been made largely through experience. Perhaps most importantly, the process clarified that the value of the project does not lie only in producing an archive of portraits. The encounters themselves, the environments represented and the relationships between them can become a means of investigating contemporary creative culture.
The paper therefore marks an early stage rather than a conclusion. Among Creatives continues to develop as a photographic project, but SICTAS helped establish a framework through which it can also evolve as practice-based research.
Paper: Environmental Portraiture as Counter-Documentation: Creative Communities and Heritage in Contemporary Thailand
Conference: SICTAS 2026, Silpakorn University International Conference in Total Art and Science
Location: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok
Year: 2026