quote /Photography is a foreign language/ Peter Galassy


....whatever else might be said about Winogrand's work, it is unsurpassed for its voracious curiosity about life at large. Winogrand turned that voracity into a highly self-conscious artistic style but, like Evans before him, he regarded photography primarily as a tool for engaging the inexhaustible reality of experience.

Evans never tired of pointing out that in respect to photography the term "documentary" properly refers not to a claim on moral truth but to an artistic style, based upon the illussion that the photograph is a transparent window on reality: the viewer stands where the photographer once stood. Nevertheless, many prefer to take the illusion for reality, looking right through the picture and seeing only its subject matter: standing there, anyone would have made the same photograph. This die-hard habit, born of endless everyday encounters with photography, renders invisible the artifice of the documentary style. As diCorcia puts it, "photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks "


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What is distinctive, and essential to grasping the originality of diCorcia's work, is the degree to which he showed sympathetic curiosity for two divergent understandings of photography. The one taking the impersonal power of popular and commercial culture as a given, approached photography as a realm of fiction and duplicity. The other, devoted to the authenticity of individual perceptions, approached photography as a way of interpreting experience. In the 1980s as that divergence evolved into open opposition, diCorcia was making art the gap between the two.

Photography is a foreign language / p10

Quote : Setting Sun

There was one photograph.

Most of it was exposed to sunlight and the tone was like white powder sprinkled onto the print. The image itself was suffused with glaring light and taken in some kind of flat expanse. The bleak scene looked like a yard. The border between the ground and the sky was unclear, as though the light had melted the two worlds. In the left part of the image, slightly toward the lower half, there was a gray, mudlike formation, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a person. The form gave the overall impression of being a man dressed in a ragged, padded kimono. His unkempt hair, looking like withered grass, pointed in our direction as he looked down. At the center of the right third of the image there was a shadow cast by an assembly of persons and when I squinted, it turned out to be three children clustered together, standing still. They all appeared to be wearing rags that were cinched at the waist with cords, and they were barefoot. Their expressions were too faint to see in the print, but they all seemed to have their gaze trained in our direction. Behind the children was something that couldn't be anything other than the wall of a house. And beyond that there was something like the overlapping outlines of two sheds that were blurred together. And even farther in the distance were the shadows of trees, growing faint and hazy. Because of them the horizon was somewhat distinguishable.

Time's Fossil/ P72/ Daido Moriyama

Photography in principal is the fossilization of some actual thing, but for a landscape to be so spectacularly turned into a fossil remarkable.

Time's Fossil/ P73/ Daido Moriyama

El Paso TX 2007


Brazil IL 2007


Memphis TN 2007


Brazil IL, 2007




A strange country

Before I came to this country, America was a big image of beautiful suburbia houses, shiny yellow Mustang with black stripe, baggy pants, pistol, drugs, and a bunch of golden retrievers running all over places. America represents a ideal image, life value, heaven.

I formed the first impression about the country in Syracuse, NY. I saw a man walking with a supermarket cart under snow, his figure was gloomy and blurry; I saw a man with baggy pants and big headset, rapping and tapping along the street in the dark night. Those people are walker, they can keep walking and walking like there is no destination. The kingdom I had been adored for life turned out to be something I don't recognize.

Back in Taiwan, everywhere is developing economically and under construction. A place is either built up a tourist spot, industrial area, or a business center. People are trying to be competitive and productive in someway. Even a street vendor is competitive. They are frenzy about politics, buying stocks and talking about all kinds of investment. If there is a lake in Taiwan which is half big, half beautiful as Greenlake here in Syracuse, there will be tons of expensive cafe shops, souvenir stores, hotels, restaurants lining up all over the area.

Here, I have the imagination the city have been through the peak, now its economic level is sagging. People moved here probably because it was once a developing booming city, right now that incentive has long gone, the citizens are therefore displaced. I wonder if that is the term "post-industrial age" is about. The citizens of this city lost their position to be productive or competitive anymore. All they can do is walking and wandering, ghost-like.

Maybe the whole country has seen it's best day. Rambo is gone, Knight Rider is gone, MacGyver is gone, even the shiny Mustang began to appear rusty. Those who were left keep wandering on the street. I stand here as a tourist with camera at hand. I shoot them.

A woman waves downward from a rooftop, 2003 Taipei




A STARE

When I was a photojournalist, I was responsible for monitoring police and firefighter's radio. I was very interested in taking people's reaction in extreme conditions. And because of this work, I got to do that a lot.

In a news event, when I witnessed something overwhelming happening, the fact you could hide behind that little frame of your camera is fascinating. Behind that little frame, I considered all those things image-wisely, calmly wait to nail the right shot, disregarded the fact you are flashing your subject right on their face weather he or she is ecstatic because of over-joyness or overwhelming because of great lose.

It felt like riding a roller coaster. And all that happens behind that little frame. There is not a specific photographer affect the way I photograph to as much as my job did.

There was an experience. I was on night shift someday in April, 2005. A suicide-intending event broadcasted through the radio about a girl who went over the rail and standed on a stick-out on fourth floor and threaten to jump. As usual, I rushed to the scene and founded the subject, dressed in bright red, easily to recognize in the dark night. I could not be more happy realize two things right at the moment- first I was the first photographer there (which means I could have the shot exclusively, and a image with a firefighter griping a girl is always an absolute-use, and probably an award winning photograph ) , second there was a vintage point right across the building where the girl was, a fourth floor balcony, if I can reach up there, I can approach the subject within 5 meters.

When I finally made it up to the balcony ( I had to bang people's door, luckily they already woke up by the disturbance earlier and kindly enough letting me in ), I quickly put on a 28-70m lens and mounted a flashlight and I headed up. The girl was standing there staring at me, face to face. No other photographers or even a firefighter was around at the moment. The distance was much more close than I expected, probably only 2, or 3 meters. It was a emotionless face. I examined her face for how long I could not remember. It was a beautiful, bony desperate face, there is no model can pose for that. I was dumbfounded. She is a subject, totally exposed herself in front of me, totally vulnerable just like I was exposed to her. I am exciting; I am shameful, and I am desperate. I couldn't even uplift camera so that I can hide behind it.

"Don't' do it" I mumbled. I didn't know why I dared talk to her. What if she jumped right after my talking to her. It is probably the first time I talked to the subject who intended to commit suicide. She did not reply but stared at me.

I did not regained conscious until other photographers came. At the moment firefighters grabbed her, flashlight showered her like crazy. Tragically enough my flashlight wouldn't recharge after the first shot. The only shot I took was later proven dead because of overblown flashlight.

One week later, one of my coworkers told me a girl was found dead outside an elementary school in the vicinity area, dressing all red. He went up to the roof trying to shoot downward to include the whole scene. He founded the girl lying on the ground staring right up through his viewfinder. The body was later proven the same girl I covered the other night. The stare comes to me once in a while since then. I didn't capture the image, but it has kept haunting me ever since.

The horrific/exciting experience was an epiphany. I began to realize the essence of shooting people's face. Everyone has their own little tragedy they can't shift blame to others, and regardless the magnitude of those personal tragedies, it will tag along their host forever. Being different from bloody events in Iraq, Indonesia tsunami, or 911, in which we can easily attribute the causes of those events to some great injustice, disaster or God divine. Those personal tragedies happen not because the irregularity of the world but the normalcy of life. Under the same experience, everyone can be equally desperate and probably at a very good rate pull off the same extreme scene, like we see in the newspaper.

That desperation is an energy , revealed in our face and make us a great image.

I shoot them.

Quote

As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. Unhappily, much in the record of your tenancy of this continent serves to confirm this view. So to wash our eyes of the depressing evidence we have raced deeper deeper into the wilderness, past the las stage-coach and the last motel, to see and claim a section of God's own garden before our fellows arrive to spoil it.

The New West ( Robert Adams ) / foreword by John Szarkowski

Quote/Philip- Lorca Di Corcia
Photography is a foreign language/ by Peter Galassi

For half a century- Henri Cartier Bresson to Robert Frank to Garry Winogrand- the open theater of the street had been a favored hunting ground for photography. The photographer's cloak of anonymity and freedom of action and the street's smorgasbord of character and incident together made an arena of seemingly endless artistic opportunity. After Winogrand's death in 1984, however, the arena was all but abandoned; dIcorcia's own retreat to the domestic world was symptomatic of a broad trend in which even those younger photographers who most admired Winogrand's example declined to pursue it. It is too early to know what diCorcia will make of this untended legacy, but photography has none more potent.

P14

"The more specific the interpretation suggested by a picture, " says dIcORCIA, "the less happy I am with it,"

P6

As a graduate student, just about the time of the Mario picture, diCorcia wrote a thesis in which he opposed two styles of filmmaking. In the first, which he identified with Jean Renoir and Francois Truffaut, the film acknowledges the breadth of the unseen world beyond the frame. In the second, identified with Fritz Lang and Hitchcock, the film presents a closed world, in which the camera's viewpoint is omniscient, even oppressive. diCorcia identified his work in still photography with the second.

P7

Quote / Weegee/ text by John Coplans

The element of journalism in Weegee, as I said, mixes with his expressionist intent. The ere are number of journalistic photographers who are equally involved in the critical moment, simplifying the image to make it more telling. I could be that with Weegee, we are not really dealing with a photojournalist at all, but one who instead used photojournalism as a cover, unconciously or not. There is a large and recognizable sector of his work in which Weegee is not a detached reportorial professional. Weegee was aware of his whole enterprise as being surreptitious and contraband. This gave him a thrill. Thus, there is a contradiction in his apparent nerveless willingness to look upon appalling scenes and drink in passively , without any apparent tremor. In one sense his images were no less or more than ghoulish still-lifes to him, but on the other hand, it was his very insistence on focusing on these lurid moments forhis personal satisfaction which gives them their exceptional resonance. Finally , our awareness of Weegee's excitement promotes these images of ostensibly banal horror to a level of artistic horror which is capable of moving us. Weegee does not apologize. This private eye had a vital insensitivity that is precious. This is his fascination.

P13

Sometimes his presence at the scene of a photograph became an active element in introducing a grotesquely humorous touch, as in the picture of a drowned man at Coney Island, in which we see serried ranks of hypnotized spectators watching an ambulance team, headed by a doctor, attemption to resuscitate the swimmer. Kneeling at the side of the supine figure is a pretty companion, his wife or girl friend, clad in a swimsuit. It is a moment of high drama. Is the man dead or alive ? Yet, at the very moment Weegee takes his phtographs of the scene, the woman turns and flashes a coquettish smile at the camera. Let us admit that this could well be an accident- but not the insipid bad taste, or rather, the human knowledge that wanted it published.

P10-P11