Natnalin, Art Photographer & Voice Of The Thai Mammary

BangkokDan is taking a short cut here – as we couldn’t and couldn’t meet Natnalin Noimai.

We therefore take – ashes over my head – that short cut: Sourcing from the young woman’s own website.

Natnalin is a Thai photographer who produces some of the finest art around here.

And understands herself as a political voice against cultural hypocrites and pseudo-purists: Natnalin’s Women Have No Tit was groundbreaking. But more about Natnalin and the Thai mammary further below.

Natnalin is in publishing – know the NATNALIN magazine?

NATNALIN magazine emphasizes on fine art photography, especially street documentary and conceptual works by both local and international artists and photographers. The magazine is said to be the only fine art photography magazine in Thailand.

NATNALIN – a magazine by the way, praised by Thailand Outlook Channel TOC as “an exclusive photo storybook. The book will give you a brand new perspective about nudity.”

Although Natnalin was born a Bangkok native, she grew up in an outskirt of the city, a combination of traditional Thai rural life style and city slicker. For the traditional art, she inherited the idea of family values – never leave anyone behind, and also street fighting skills. In the past, she was known for beating up boys in a bloodbath.

While attending Rangsit University, she decided to drop out and go to France. There in Paris, she went to ICART PHOTO, a well known photography school, working in Studio Elle as a trainee.

In the year 2000, she won an award in the Festival Européen de la photo de nu, Arles, France, with Silent Skin: Body Deconstruction.

Natnalin was the only female photographer in that exhibition. And again, in 2002, her work was selected as a poster for “Grains de Peau” and exhibited at BEAUX-ARTS in Paris.

The same year, her new series Fruit, Flora and Things – a lighter look at the world – was selected and published in the French version of American PHOTO. Philosophical and imaginative, the series is about flowers and people, both strange and beautiful.

In 2005, she produced another new series: Women Have No Tit. This time her works became more political, concerning a cultural repression led by civil servants and the Thai mass media.

In Thailand, says Natnalin, the fascist idea of oppression and cultural repression is not initiated by the government, but by a group of powerful civil servants and so called intellectuals, supported by local medias.

Remember the saga around the travel guide book “Bangkok Inside Out”?

Read our related piece The Thai Taliban.

When Ladda Tangsuphachai, director of cultural monitoring at the Ministry of Culture, had ordered the clampdown and has asked police to consider legal action against the authors, Guy Sharett, an Israeli national, and Daniel Ziv, a Canadian writer based in Jakarta?

Sharett and Ziv had to flee the Kingdom.

As Ms. Ladda complained to a Thai-language newspaper that the book had focused too much on “fake goods, gambling and gay performances”, as well as nightclub zones such as Patpong and Nana.

In particular, she objected to a photo of a foreigner with a bare-breasted bar girl on his lap in one section of the book.

And these are the same group of social extremists who led the coup in 2006: The Age of Cultural Repression emerged in full scale in 2005, and continued on until today, getting worse by the minutes, as Nirmal Ghosh wrote in Singapore’s Straits Times.

And thank them for Thailand’s new and proper nightlife!

What led Natnalin to her first political campaign: Women Have No Tit – the title says it all.

Thai women have no tit. People are not allowed to see them in any circumstances. Can’t show them even they are yours. Tits are terrible things, no matter that children in the past survived on milk from their mother’s tits. For the intellectual-fascists’ mind, tits can not exist. Women’s tits are the enemy of the state. It’s an anti-human ideology that rules the nation.

The series was exhibited in Milan – Castellanza, Italy (2005), and published in IL FOTOGRAFO magazine in Italy.

However, on the lighter side in the same year, she also worked on the series called Bad Angel with Flowers – photographs of cute young girls.

Just lovely, no politics this time.

2006 was like a vacation. Natnalin spent her days traveling and in a bike shop.

We’re still waiting for her works in 2007. Might expect to see lots of motorcycles images and bikers?

Bikers with flowers?!

Maybe I prefer Natnalin’s political series.

Natnalin Noimai