“If you take a closer look and approach it with humor and creativity, you’ll find that what appears to be normal often has a unique story of its own waiting for us to discover and laugh along with it.”

Akkara Naktamna (born in 1979) is a contemporary street photographer currently based in Bangkok, Thailand.

He’s a self-taught photographer and learned photography from photography websites, photo books, and experiments on the street.

Artist statement: “On a superficial level, everything around us seems so ordinary that we don’t bother to pause and take a second look at it. But if you take a closer look and approach it with humor and creativity, you’ll find that what appears to be normal often has a unique story of its own waiting for us to discover and laugh along with it.”

Essay about Humorous Street Photography

Image from the series Signs from Street Photographer Akkara Naktamna“My past works are humor street photography which I was influenced for long time by Elliott Erwitt, and many street photographers from Europe; iN-PUBLiC collective. I still love this style, but I also want to try a new thing.

The photo series that I have been working on. It’s very excited when I think about something and try to expose it to be a story or set. It’s not just shooting one photograph and done; you need a time to focus, build it continuously, and wait patiently. For this project, I combined street photography with conceptual, narrated them sequentially and hide some significant in it.

‘Signs’ is a photo series that represents ordinary things we usually found in everyday. We often choose to overlook those things because they don’t important to our daily life. Similar to news of someone’s death that we feel sad when looking on it, but few second after asking by someone about dinner, we forget that death and ready for eating. Or the politics, we look on it with a boring face because of deceptive politicians. We avoid to know about them and turn to do something else; even though, they’re destroying our country.

These things are “Signs” that are hiding themselves among things we called ‘boring’. They don’t just declare as they are, but they’re warning and predicting some terrible phenomenon that will happen in the near future.”

‘Signs’ has been featured on Invisible Photographer Asia (Singapore), Rinse.io (Taiwan), and recently in Slideluck Bangkok (Thailand).

Interview with Akkara Naktamna

 

Image from the series Signs from Street Photographer Akkara NaktamnaAkkara Naktamna, what’s in your photography bag? What kind of equipment do you use?

In the past time, I had a serious camera in my bag, Fuji-XPro1. It’s quite heavy, classic, and you’ll look cool like a master of street photographer when you’re shooting. Also you don’t need a film processing that’s really impressive. But now I have realized that I prefer a camera that’s lighter than pro camera.

“I’m quite happy and almost forget my classic heavy camera.”

So when you look in my bag, you’ll see a small compact camera of Sony RX100 Mark ll, with 2 rechargeable batteries, just that. The quality is not bad, it looks friendly more than the old one and I can get closer to people easier which they don’t notice on me. I’m quite happy and almost forget my classic heavy camera.

Image from the series Signs from Street Photographer Akkara NaktamnaImage from the series Signs from Street Photographer Akkara Naktamna

Image from the series Signs from Street Photographer Akkara NaktamnaWhat’s your favorite website about photography?

For street photography, I suggest magnumphotos.com and in-public.com which are basic knowledge of mine.

Which advice would you give someone who wants to get started with photography?

There are three things I kept in my mind when I started to learn photography:

  • Look at many good photographs
  • Find your own style
  • Shoot everyday

More about Akkara Naktama

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