The pandemic lockdown has given many people the chance to search through old treasure chests, weeding out junk and sometimes finding forgotten or previously undervalued gems.

‘When I Was Twenty’ is one such gem: the student work of an established and mature artist which turns out to be as potent as any of his later work.

Long before his iconic Pink Man, at Srinakharinvirot University Manit Sriwanichpoom was a student of the great photo-artist Pramuan Burusphat, who opened his eyes to the expotential of the photographic medium, when he realised that it was possible to make as well as take photographs.

The joy of that discovery as manifested in ‘When I Was Twenty’ is unclouded, free of over-thinking and second-guessing over what is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Here is simply the sensation of the sheer fun of instinctual self-expression, which the viewer experiences viscerally. The end result is a book of poetry in images; wistful, anxious, dreamy, intense; brooding guilt-ridden, eerie, smutty and tactile, spooky as sex and mortality, and an awareness of one’s own monstrousness as pungent as the raw eggs and fish fillets at the young man’s feet in one photograph, waiting to be thrown in the hot oil of future trials, to sustain his hormones and fuel his dreams. Hard to imagine that Pink Man would one day emerge from this dark swamp of adolescence.

21 x 21 x 0.8 cm, 78 pages, text in Thai and English, Softcover, 2023.