ART DELI

2008-08-13T03:31:00.000-07:00

哈金自由生活 P 399

漸漸地，他領悟到自己和老人之間的根本區別。劉先生是個流亡人士，他的生活是由過去決定的，只有跟將他放逐的權力中樞保持著關聯，他才可能存在。這就是劉先生的悲劇 ﹣他不可能把自己與那個能夠時刻控制他，折磨他的國家機器分開。沒有故國已經構成的框架，他的生活就會失去意義和支撐。這一定是那多懷舊的流亡人士會頌揚苦難和愛國主義的原因所在。他們人在這裡,可是因為受了輝煌過去的束縛，他們不能適應在新大陸的生活。相反，武男是個移民，沒有顯赫的，也是沉重的過去。對當局來說，他什麼也不是，根本不存在，他連個可以去懇求的官員也沒有。他不過是個移民，甚至是個難民，誰會聽他說什麼？

P436

武男感到，元寶這樣縱情的虛誇，己經超出了僅僅是虛榮心的程度。他在利用兩種語言之間的差別進行欺騙 ﹣沒幾個中國人熟悉 “藍星“ 月刊和蒂姆的寫作，那篇譯文可能會誤導他們，使他們以為那是一份和中國各種大雜誌一樣有名的刊物，而蒂姆．都靈頓則一定是位公認的藝術評家了。“藝術世界“ 是海外發行的一份高品質中文雜誌，所以，把原來那篇文章搬到這樣一個大雜誌上，就等於把元寶抬到了一一個不同的位置，好像他在美國已經是個名人了。簡而言之，通過這種誤導的過程，在中文讀者心目中就把元寶的形象拔高到他原本沒到的高度了．

這真是個聰明的騙術。武男心想，元寶要是把更多時間花在藝術上，他的畫會好得多。

P275

小男人

幾個月前，一位女士在一篇題為“譴責小男人“ 的尖刻文章裡批評了一些中國男人，說他們沉湎於過去，不作任何融入美國社會的努力。按她的話說....這些人不能適應這裡的生活光會在他們的妻子和女朋友身上撒氣，把自己的失敗歸咎於美國。在愛國主義和維護中國文化的託詞下，他們拒絕向其他文化學習任何東西。他們在其他種族人群中沒有朋友，也拒不學英語。他們就像陷在缸裡的螃蟹，互相踩踏，誰也爬不出去。......可他們還堅信自己的天才，來到美國是虎落平陽，英雄無用武之地，好像全世界沒人比他們更倒楣了。在美國大多數中國女人，天性裡並不想當女強人，可他們的小男人逼得她們承擔更多的責任，同時扮演妻子和丈夫兩個角色。

如今，女人用小男人的稱呼去攻擊男人是很普遍的。那意味著：那男人是個該被所有女人鄙視的，亳無希望的窩囊廢。

2008-06-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Gregory Crewdson, interview with Melissa Harris ( www.aperture.org/crewdson )

Credwson:

So whoever the photographer is, that's a constant, because it's who they are. It's their history. It's their trauma, it's their desire, it's their fascination, it's their terror - all that. So you have that story, that compulsion, and then you have the pictorial form., which is the attempt to take that invisible story and represent it in pictorial form. So it's that coming - together of form and content, essentially. Then that changes, because you continue to try to reinvent the form to accommodate the story as much as possible. Of course, in the end it's impossible to fully achieve the form , because the story is murky and undefined. So you try it over and over again, and you are hoping by the next picture you'll get it - and that keeps you going. It's like this unsolvable equation.

2008-05-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

PIEERE ET GILLES : DOUBLE JE Aperture May, 2008

P20

Complexity was clearly on the agenda in this very well-conceived show, which emphasized both the diversity and the relevance of a controversial body of work always teetering on the edge of High Kitsch. Political commentaries ( colorful but not very convincing images about poverty, environmental crisis, the war in Iraq and abused women, for example ) were juxtaposed with the better-known pissing gardeners, dark-skinned boys, and bilical characters. The viewer was asked to see profundity in the sensuality and the glamour, to envisage ( as Paul Ardenne writes in the accompanying book) "another possible vision of humanity ...where love above all will reign master of the world." In other words, we were asked to view this exhibition as a new, utopian vision of the Family of Man - The Family of Erotic Man, one might say - where beauty will conquer all , level all differences , and heal all wounds. The audacity of such an ahistorical ( and over - blown ) interpretation renders one speechless, but it did lend a certain weight and poignancy to an oeuvre often seen as unremittingly lightweight and one-dimensional.

2008-04-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

reGeneration/ Preface

What are young photographers up to these days? Whose influence are they heeding, consciously or unconsciously ? Are they conformist or contentious ? Idealist or realist ? Escapist or engaged ? Are we on the cusp of something new ( a movement, a revolt, a new dawn), or still at the tail-end of a chapter, wallowing in the so-called decadent phase? Are emerging photographers leaning toward classical approaches to photography or inclined towards those of contemporary art ? Are they remaining loyal to film and chemistry or abandoning camp in droves for pixels and Photoshop ? Or are they at ease with a mix of the two technologies, according to their needs ?

2008-03-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

Quote / Shomei Tomatsu 55

Tomatsu seems to have liked to work at a distance from the subject, so that it becomes necessary to peer into the picture if it is to be understood. One might in part explain this as diffidence on Tomatsu's part- not wishing to poke his nose into the minutiae of others' lives. Nonetheless , at long range, those lives become all the more fascinating , since this guarantees the authenticity of the pictures. Unaware of the photographer's presence, the subjects would have unselfconsciously given a reliable account of themselves. Manyof these early phtographers therefore invite detailed scrutiny, rewarded by the eventual recognition of all sorts of seemingly extraneous evidence. Paradoxically, this deliberately restrained documentary gives us the fullest possible account of a subject's life. All those apparently superfluous bits and pieces, which we - along with conventional documentarists - usually choose to overlook, in fact constitute the basis of our lives.

Another important aspect of the early pictures is their darkness and the suppression of detail. Darkness is a feature in much of the poetic documentary of the post-war years. It had romantic value as a pointer to melancholy. Light, for which one might read enlightenment, ahd to struggle to overcome the spiritual darkness of the era. But there is little of this metaphysical darkness in Tomatsu's pictures of the mid-1950s. Nonetheless, he liked to deploy shadows. Sometimes almost to the detriment of the picture, obscuring significant physical details. Many of the photographs appear at first to be nothing more than arrangements in chiaroscuro. What lies behind the shadows can only be surmised from the firm evidence available. The act of looking at the picture therefore often turns into a prolonged enquiry, as one works from the known to the unknown. Increasingly, this became Tomatsu's method of ensuring that audiences examined his pictures, a way of inviting them into the scene. If the image involved the human form, it had to be understood by reference to one's won limbs and features. This meant that the photograph was to some degree internalized, subject to what one might call corporeal reflection. Many of Tomatsu's pictures ask to be re-enacted in imagination, to a point where the subject is brought as close as photography will allow.

2008-02-19T07:44:00.000-08:00

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 "

------------

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

2008-02-12T18:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-10T16:29:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-02-10T15:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-03T15:17:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

Quote / Prairie / Robert Adams / Denver Art MUSEUM/1978

Mystery in this landscape is a certainty, an eloquent one. There is everywhere silence- a silence in thunder, in wind, in the call of doves, even a silence in the closing of a pickup door. If you are crossing the plains, leave the interstate and find a back road on which to walk; listen.

Foreword/ R.A.

2008-01-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

Quote/Setting Sun

One step after the next, step after step, a familiar place takes form, accompanied by the sound of foot falls. While my body and soul are so steeped in the everyday that I might drown, still I somehow manage to earn a living, have tea or a drink with friends, experience new meeting and partings with an indeterminate array of individuals, all colored with feeling of happiness or sadness or anger.

The familiar place, the familiar street corner, provides limitless possibilities for the discovery of scandalous crime articles, dubious advertisements, fashions sweet and soft, quick chats held in a patch of sunlight. There are countless examples.

Sometimes , in the background behind the varied surface of the everyday, the inexplicable shadow of human existence creeps in like a fog. This shadow gets trapped at the barrier between what is expressible through words and what is not, accumulating like an unanswered riddle in the hollow of spreading emptiness, as if it is becoming some sort of creature that continues to multiply within the opaque whirlpool that is the everyday.

.....

Photography provides a verisimilar "other reality." No matter how much one might say that it presents pure fantasy or delusion, photography is about capturing an image of the outside world, which means that a photograph is only possible if it uses reality as a go-between. The life of a photograph, reborn by passing through this interactive relationship with reality, can have a powerful impact on us.

Photography as another reality / Shigeo Gocho / P52

2008-01-27T20:12:00.000-08:00

Quote/SIGNS / Walker Evans / Andrei Codrescu

The twentieth century is- or maybe I should say was- the American century: demotic, technological, robust, full of bluster, simultaneously naive and cunning. The first half of it was ruled by the newspaper and the cinema. It was aso the time of popular writing, of huge advertisements, of lettering that invaded every nook and cranny and even wrote the skyline. America wrote big, with bold new alphabets, in lightbulbs, in neon, in smoke.
Walker Evans pursued this text in all its variations, from modestly scrawled shopkeeper advertisements of the 1930s to the purely abstract graffiti of the 1970s. /P5

-------
At the same time, to the recently Paris-imbued traveler, it must have been an aesthetic gesture, as well as a homecoming. While language itself is turned into an image, other pieces of the landscape are turned into language. The early New York pictures find endless pleasure in uncovering shapes produced by anonymous industrial-age artisans, as well as random instances of city life. Letters, grids, scaffolding, fire escapes, windows and window shutters, chains, lunch counters with their repeated shapes of cups, plates and saucers, rows of people, smokestacks, P7

-------
America's signs in their sophistication or awkwardness inscribe the story of a giving, an urging to partake in the constant overproduction of goods. And it may be precisely in exploring the gap between the cheerful optimism of advertising propaganda and the reality of Depression-stricken America the Evans found his art. / P10

2008-01-27T20:07:00.001-08:00

Quote/SETTING SUN

Landscape is thus not considered static, but transient, ephemeral, never stopping.

p42

It is therefore from the gap between perceptions of cruel reality and his weltanschanuung - in other words , from inter play between the extremes of the real and the ideal, as they are juxtaposed in his shutter- that meaning arises.

It is without question precisely in this juxtaposition that one can find the potential relevance of photography to history, culture and politics most closely approaching the realm of probability. One may never be able to discover anything so enigmatic as "the truth" in a photograph, but if one were to settle for something close to it , it maybe that it consists of neither an absolute affirmation nor an absolute denial anything, but something between the two. For example, if one were to photograph a single tree as an absolute instance of a tree and at the same time doubt the established concept of "tree-ness" itself, and see it as a physical entity that is something other than a tree, then one would begin to realize the necessity of having multiple vantage points.

The Decision to Shoot / Daido Moriyama / p34

2008-01-27T20:03:00.000-08:00

Quote//Between the Eyes / Dvid Levi Strauss

It is partly the politics of images , the way they are organized , has changed, and this has acted to erode their effectiveness, and their power to elicit action. .... But there has always been something about "real pictures" of real violence that undercuts their political effect, and separates them from experience.

Roland Barthes addressed this lack of effect. "It is not enough for the photographer to signify the horrible for us to experience it," he wrote. These images, intended to convey horror, fail to do so "because , as we look at them , we are in each dispossessed of our judgement: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing- except a simle right of intellectual acquiescence... "
Such images do not compel us to action, but to acceptance. The action has already been taken , and we are not implicated. Our complicity is concealed, intact. "The perfect legibility of the scene, its formulation, dispenses us from receiving the image in all its scandal; reduced to the state of pure language , the photograph does not disorganize us; We are not disorganized because news images operate within a perfectly organized rhetoric of consumption, the pure language of the spectatorship under which we now live. Images of suffering and misery elsewhere in the world are used as reminders of what we are free from. They operate in the greater image environment of consumption to offset images of contentment, to provide the necessary contrast. Their use value, and their effect, is palliative. This effect is far-reaching and one of the histories thus buried was that of Rwanda.

A SEA OF GRIEFS IS NOT A PROSCENIUM/ P81-82

2008-01-25T16:06:00.000-08:00

Quote/Between the eyes / David Levi Strauss

It's effectiveness- the only applicable measurement of propaganda- derives from the historical amnesia of most Americans and the perennial desire to reduce the scale and significance of atrocities by attributing them to lone, monstrously evil madmen. The New Public's image contains everything one needs to know about the analogy for it to be effective, and reflects the subtle manipulations of that analogy visually. Saddam Hussein is Hitler. What's not to believe?

But belief itself is vulnerable to the kind of massive propaganda assault and general degradation of information that accompanied ( and will certainly follow) the Gulf War. The crisis of belief we are experiencing is much larger than a simple mistrust of photographs. It involves the wholesale, active relinquishing of our public right to know. When the manipulation and control of all forms of public imaging have become this pervasive, this complete, it is more than ever necessary to resist, to reassert individual initiative in the production, reception and use of images, and to find new ways to reinvest images with "believability" -before belief itself becomes part of the collateral damage.

P78/Photography and Belief

If material conditions need to be redescribed, more painstakingly and in novel forms, in order to be reinvested with " believability," then we can surely develop the form- and the means of dissemination- to do so.
- Martha Rosler, "Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Ethical Considerations"

P71/Photography and Belief

2008-01-25T13:25:00.000-08:00

Quote / Setting Sun

In novels, fiction is a given;
In paintings, a subjective re-composition ( or else the fabrication of fantasy) is the motif;
In theater or film, the actor's performance as imitation is understood.
But only Photographic Realism - which has its basic tenet the absolutely upstaged snapshot - has the potential to connect directly with societal reality.
In photography, there cannot be anything more impure or self-destructive than to imitate a painting , or to have a model pose.
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Photographic Realism and the Salon Picture/ p24 /Ken Domon

A photographer is both a passerby and a dweller. That said, regardless of the condition with which he looks, the process of continuing to look doesn't change. A photographer cannot cure like a doctor, cannot defend like a lawyer, cannot analyze like a scholar, cannot support like a priest, cannot bring about laughter like a comic storyteller, cannont entertain like a singer, but can merely look. That's good enough. Well, no, that's all there is. A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stare fixedly, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world. The human who bets on looking - that's is a photographer.
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The man who said I SAW IT I SAW IT and passed it by / p28-p29/ Shomei Tomatsu

2007-02-11T21:28:00.000-08:00

America, Sadako, Me

To most Asians, America is a term which could not be more familiar. When I was growing up in Taiwan, the term represented a valuation, fashion and absolute power. It was not until I began my studies in this country that I realized how awkward and strange it is for me to fit into this environment. Most Americans have already been exposed to a mix of different cultures, whether they like it or not. For a foreigner like me, coming from a culturally homogeneous country to America was a complete shock. I thought I might have some idea of the environment before I came here, but actually I knew nothing.

That is where the figure of Sadako comes in. Sadako is a ghost character from the classic Japanese horror movie “Ringu (1998)”. Her posture is that of a hanged woman with longhair. According to an old saying, the ghost would linger around certain places because of unfinished business. Once in a while Sadako appears in family albums or snap shots randomly taken on the street. In Asian culture, this is a bad omen, bringing sickness, disaster, and sometimes death to the inhabitants of the photographs. When that happens, people are taught to ignore the figures' appearance and hide the picture.

In this project, I am using Sadako as a metaphor to interpret the strangeness, loneliness and ignorance of the American environment. In producing the photographs, I randomly break into peoples activity on the street, just l as I broke into the culture when I came here. In a repetition of much of my own daily experience, the figure is irrelevant to the place it stands and the people it is pictured with.

To American viewer, these images seem both absurd and exotic. The allegory behind the figure is completely lost, only the viewers' ignorance left. To an outsider, the images suggest a broken cultural icon, forever lingering in a world in which it does not belong.

2007-01-29T18:27:00.000-08:00

Language has always been a big issue lies between me and this country. As a photographer, the barrier of language and strangeness of the culture could be either problematic or interesting. While I was struggling in developing my project here, I started to drive along Salina St back and forth to see the city I live, the world outside college. That is when I begin to shoot along the street.

I came to the street as a stranger, ,a tourist, an foreigner and in terms of culture, an outsider. Being a photographer gives me a way to engage with people, observe the culture. My camera is a tool for me to observe the true America culture and further explore the ideology behind this intriguing and sometimes desolate land.

During the process, I ask the subject use one sentence to present themselves in the image and the message would come out as a brief message printed as part of the caption. Talking with people is as interesting as taking their pictures.

In October 2006, I met a family in the intersection of Salina and Washington St. I asked if I can take their picture, one man responded asking me if I can spare some money. " Don't take people's money ! Dad ! "A little boy with a bike walked quickly with his mother across the street heading north after dropping the word. Eventually, the man posed in front of my camera. He gave me one sentence to present himself-"I am a poor people , but a good people." He then left quickly to caught with his wife and kid without taking a dime in pocket.

Many times I can not relate to the conversation due to the lack of cultural background. During the process of struggling to comprehend literal meaning, I proceed in my way ideologically to forge my viewpoint about the people and the landscape they stand.

Right now I am defining the project as a community project. Except for regular traditional gallery space, I am printing those images as a stack of business card and poster and try to utilize some public space to spread the image out, to deliver the message back to the people working or living on the street.

2006-12-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins
My soul has grown deep like the rivers
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were yound
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

Mysoul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes / (qutote from African American Visual Aesthetics / David C Driskell )