Introduction
Bangkok, 1978.
For seventeen years, Somchai has photographed the people who pass through his small Bangkok studio—brides, children, soldiers, families and ordinary people preserving a single moment of their lives.
But the city outside his window is changing.
New buildings are rising. New technology promises photographs in minutes. Tourists arrive searching for the “real Bangkok” before they believe it disappears.
When an American traveller asks Somchai to show him the old Bangkok, their journey through the city raises a different question: when a place changes, what exactly are we trying to preserve?
The Last Photograph is a warm historical short story about memory, progress, photography and the constantly changing city of Bangkok.
The Last Photograph
J. K. Lunis
Bangkok, 1978
Every morning at nine, Somchai put twelve photographs in the window. He had done this for seventeen years. The photographs changed. The arrangement did not.
Four across the top. Four in the middle. Four along the bottom.
Wedding portraits went in the centre because people stopped to look at brides. Children went beside them because mothers stopped to look at children. Men in military uniform went near the edge. Passport photographs went nowhere. Nobody stopped to admire a passport photograph.
Somchai knew these things. At fifty-six, he knew many things about photographs that nobody had ever thought to ask him. He knew people preferred their left side even when they claimed not to. He knew almost every man asked whether he should smile and almost every woman smiled before he could ask. He knew mothers straightened children’s collars. He knew husbands became impatient. He knew brides never did.
And he knew that the instant-photograph shop three doors down was going to ruin him. His daughter knew it too.
“You should buy one.”
“With what?”
“Money.”
“Excellent suggestion.” Mali rolled her eyes. She was twenty-four and worked at a hotel near Silom Road, where foreigners paid more for one night than Somchai paid in monthly rent. She had come to the shop before work wearing a blue skirt and white blouse.
Somchai disliked the uniform because it made her look like an adult. She was an adult. He disliked that too.
“You have savings,” Mali said.
“I have emergency savings.”
“This is an emergency.”
“No. Fire is an emergency. Hospital is an emergency. Your brother returning from Chiang Mai with another business idea is an emergency.”
Mali laughed. Somchai continued arranging photographs.
Outside, Bangkok moved past his window. Buses coughed smoke into the morning air. Tuk-tuks slipped through gaps that weren’t gaps. Food vendors occupied pieces of pavement as though their families had been granted the land by royal decree.
A monk passed carrying an alms bowl. Behind him walked two European tourists, already sweating. Bangkok had always been busy. Lately it seemed to be in a hurry.
“People don’t want to wait three days for photographs anymore,” Mali said.
“Good photographs take time.”
“They want them today.”
“Then they can have bad photographs today.”
Mali kissed his cheek. “You’re impossible.”
“I raised you. What does that make you?”
“Late.”
She ran out. Somchai watched until she disappeared into the crowd, then looked towards the shop three doors down.
A sign in the window promised:
PHOTOGRAPHS IN MINUTES
Somchai turned his back on it. Some things should not be encouraged.
His first customer was a young man who needed a photograph for a job application. The second was a grandmother with two boys. The third was American.
Somchai knew this because the man told him within thirty seconds.
“California.”
Somchai nodded. The American pointed at the photographs displayed on the wall.
“You take all these?”
“Yes.”
“Beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
The man was perhaps thirty. Longish hair. Camera around his neck. Backpack on the floor. Tourists often carried cameras. This puzzled Somchai. People came into his shop and admired his photographs while carrying expensive equipment capable of taking their own.
“What do you want photographed?” Somchai asked.
The American pointed outside. “Bangkok.”
Somchai waited.
“All of it.”
Somchai looked towards the door. “That may require a larger studio.”
The American laughed. “I mean old Bangkok. Real Bangkok.”
There it was. Somchai had heard this before. Foreigners were always looking for real Bangkok. Apparently the millions of people actually living in Bangkok were insufficient evidence of its reality.
“You want temples?”
“No. Ordinary life.”
“People?”
“People. Streets. Old buildings. Canals.”
“Why?”
The American seemed surprised. “Because it’s disappearing.”
Somchai looked outside again. Bangkok appeared very much present.
“What is disappearing?”
“The old city. They’re building everywhere.”
“That is generally what cities do.”
The American smiled. “You don’t mind?”
“Why would I?”
“Losing the old things.”
Somchai considered him, then pointed towards a chair. “Sit.”
The American sat.
“You want portrait?”
“No.”
“Then why are you in photography studio?”
The man laughed again. “I was asking if you’d show me places to photograph.”
“No.”
“I’d pay you.”
“How much?”
His name was David. The following Sunday, Somchai showed him Bangkok.
Not the Bangkok David expected.
He took him first to a concrete apartment building. David stared at it.
“What is this?”
“My sister’s home.”
“I thought we were going to see old Bangkok.”
“You said ordinary life.”
“Yes, but—”
“My sister is ordinary.”
David looked embarrassed. “Of course.”
They went upstairs. Somchai’s sister fed them until David looked frightened. Then they went to a market.
David photographed fish laid over ice, a woman chopping pork, two boys sharing a bottle of orange drink. He photographed an old wooden house beside a canal, then the new concrete house beside it.
“Don’t you prefer the wooden one?” he asked.
Somchai looked at both. “The concrete one has a toilet inside.”
David lowered his camera. “Right.”
“And when it rains, the roof doesn’t leak.”
“I see.”
“My cousin owns the wooden one.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“My cousin hates it.”
David smiled. “You’re making this difficult.”
“You are paying me.”
They continued. Somchai showed him a cinema that had opened when Mali was a child. A tailor who had worked from the same shop for forty years. A new bank. An old spirit house standing beside a construction site. A woman selling noodles beneath a billboard advertising Japanese televisions.
David photographed everything.
Late in the afternoon they sat beside the Chao Phraya drinking cold beer. Boats moved along the river. Across the water, temple roofs caught the sun.
David raised his camera. Somchai put a hand in front of it.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Drink your beer.”
David lowered the camera. They sat quietly.
After a while, David said, “You really don’t care about preserving any of it?”
Somchai frowned. “I preserve things every day.”
“Photographs.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t mind the city changing.”
“That is different.”
“How?”
Somchai looked at the river. When he was a boy, his mother had taken him across Bangkok by boat. There had been roads, of course, but not like now. There had been fewer cars. Fewer buildings. Fewer foreigners. Fewer of almost everything.
He remembered thinking Bangkok enormous. His father had thought it overcrowded. His grandfather had apparently thought it barely a city at all.
“Which Bangkok would you preserve?” Somchai asked.
David considered this. “The traditional one.”
“Which year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before hotels?”
“Maybe.”
“Before cars?”
David smiled. “I see what you’re doing.”
“Before electricity?”
“All right.”
“Before your country sent soldiers here?”
David’s smile disappeared. Somchai drank his beer.
“You want to stop the city at the moment you find interesting.”
David looked across the river. After a while he nodded.
“Yes. I suppose I do.”
“So does everyone.”
Three months later, Mali came into the shop carrying a box. Somchai looked at it suspiciously.
“No.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t even looked.”
“I know.”
Mali put the box on the counter. It was a camera.
Not the instant camera from three doors down. A newer Japanese model. Automatic exposure. Built-in meter. Far easier to use than the equipment Somchai had spent half his life mastering.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s from David.”
That stopped him.
“He sent it from America.”
“Why?”
“There’s a letter.”
Somchai opened it. David had enclosed photographs from their day together: his sister leaning from her apartment window, the market, the wooden house, the concrete house, the spirit house beside the construction site and the noodle seller beneath the television advertisement.
And one photograph Somchai did not remember David taking.
Himself. Sitting beside the river. Beer in hand. Looking across the water.
On the back David had written:
You were right. I was photographing what I thought Bangkok should remain. You showed me what it was becoming.
Somchai read it twice, then examined the camera.
“Expensive,” he said.
“Probably.”
“Wasteful.”
“Probably.”
He picked it up. It was lighter than expected. He looked through the viewfinder.
Mali stood on the other side of the counter.
Somchai focused.
Click.
She stared at him. “You said you hated it.”
“I do.”
“You just used it.”
“I was confirming that I hate it.”
“Of course.”
The instant-photograph shop closed the following year. Not because Somchai defeated it. Another shop opened nearby with newer machines. Then another.
The problem with progress, Somchai discovered, was that it did not remain progressive for very long.
By 1985, customers expected photographs faster than he could comfortably provide them. By 1988, Mali convinced him to renovate. The old wooden counter went. The darkroom changed. The twelve photographs in the window became twenty.
Somchai complained about every improvement. Then used all of them.
Bangkok changed faster. Buildings rose. Roads widened. Hotels multiplied. The skyline began climbing. Tourists arrived in numbers that would once have seemed impossible.
Mali married. She had a daughter. Somchai photographed the wedding, then the baby, then the child’s first school uniform.
He photographed families, monks, businessmen, soldiers, brides and children. People came wanting proof of who they were at a particular moment.
Somchai gave it to them.
In 1993, a young Australian woman entered the shop carrying a guidebook. Somchai was seventy-one. He worked only three days a week now. Mali ran the business. Her daughter, Pim, had begun helping after school.
The Australian woman looked around. “Have you been here long?”
“Since 1961.”
Her eyes widened. “You must have seen Bangkok change so much.”
Somchai smiled. He had become accustomed to the question.
“It has.”
“Do you miss the old Bangkok?”
He looked at the photographs covering the walls. Thousands had passed through his hands. Most of the people in the earliest ones were old now. Some were dead. Buildings disappeared. Businesses closed. Children became parents. Young men became grandfathers.
The city had never stopped long enough for anybody to preserve it.
But the photographs had.
Somchai pointed towards the wall. “You tell me.”
The woman stepped closer. She studied a photograph from 1964, then one from 1972, another from 1981.
“It’s extraordinary.”
“Yes.”
“Which Bangkok was the best?”
Somchai laughed.
She looked at him, confused. “Sorry. Did I say something funny?”
“No.”
He walked to the window. Outside, traffic filled the street. A motorcycle slipped between cars. A woman sold fruit from a cart. Two monks waited to cross. A businessman spoke into a mobile telephone.
Above them rose buildings that had not existed when David came looking for the real Bangkok.
Somchai pointed outside. “That one.”
“The Bangkok now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it is the only one anybody can live in.”
Behind him, Pim was arranging photographs in the window. Four across the top. Four in the middle. Four along the bottom.
Somchai had told her she could arrange them however she liked. She had ignored him.
“Grandfather?”
“Yes?”
“This one?”
She held up a wedding photograph.
“Centre.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you ask?”
Pim grinned.
Somchai turned back to the street. Somewhere beneath the concrete, glass, traffic and electric wires was the city of his childhood. It had not vanished. It had simply become part of what came next.
He raised the Japanese camera David had sent him fifteen years earlier. He had replaced it twice since then, but kept the original at home.
Through the viewfinder he saw the fruit seller, the monks, the businessman and a little girl pulling her mother towards a shop window.
Not old Bangkok. Not new Bangkok.
Just Bangkok.
Somchai pressed the shutter.
End