We live in a small town in the agricultural plains of western Taiwan. My husband, Michael, and I moved here four months ago for a number of reasons; but most pivotally, I had made a relationship with the Chinese-speaking world that two years of previous living, working and traveling in mainland China did not suffice as enough. You too have a special place that awakened you in someway (I’d wage a bet). In the practice of photography, our ‘place’ is one of our most potent ingredients, right up there with the presence of light. Our place inspires and/or frazzles us to point a camera at it. I was inspired and frazzled by China via the undeviating attention and persistence it required of me. Admittedly and naively, I suspected that my China familiarity had trained me for whatever the island of Taiwan has to offer. But in truth, the assumption that I’m ever culturally equipped to photograph anywhere I land is sorely naive, and I try to check myself periodically. Photographing under this delusion is perhaps like fishing using a broad net with wide holes. You’ll definitely catch something impressive at some point, but there are the unfortunate dolphins, and all the smaller tasty ones that will slip back into the dark oblivion.

We are not exactly frazzled, I am anything but. We maintain a quiet and straight forward life. I take daily jogs through the farms on small roads big enough for scooters. There are farmer women wrapped to the eyes in multi-colored paisley and floral. I watch them. There is something about this countryside that reminds me not to take it for granted. I can see countryside back home, but I will never see old women tending the fields.

Out here photographic inspiration comes not in the heavy-hand of the blazingly obvious – not much is ever obvious. Instead, it arises from a daily experience where one in a thousand of unknowns gradually comes into focus. For instance, there are some major mountains to the east of us that rarely show themselves through the haze. But every few weeks, they gloriously appear. We can see clear across the miles of farmland up to their almost +10,000 foot peaks.

We spend our weekends cycling through the farmland and small dusty, nearly empty towns. Everything that Taiwan eats is here: rice, sugarcane, ducks, greens, fruits. The smells morph from fragrant to earthy to noxious; from orange groves and sugar cane mills, to duck waste, to burning garbage, tars, and the ever-present incense and smoldering paper money that wire blessings up to the ancestors. We like to take pit stops in the neighborhood temples that jut frenetically into the sky.

Their well-tended chambers pump out both musk and recorded prayer music, which echo through whatever semblance there is of a town. The temples for the sea goddess, Matzu, or the other local deities spring up in the small towns like wild flowers. The temple economy is run by, from what I hear, organized crime, playing out a familiar scheme of money laundering mixed with old time devotions. Pious retirees swirl around the country in tour buses, popping into small-town, but no-less renown, mega-temples to pay their respects and offer-up their pennies.

We get misguided by lack of signs or the surplus of confusing signs. We cross our own path often and end up following soot-footed farmers on their motorcycles back out to familiar roads. We’ve enlisted so many people on our mission to nowhere. We ride in the dark, staring out onto moonlit fields and through living room windows. The dark homes glow, but dimly, with red ancestral altar rooms on top floors, to flickering blue TV rooms down below.

Blazing scooters and country traffic threaten us at small intersecting side streets. Michael has been swiped by buses and motorcycles a few times. It is enough to make us avoid certain regions entirely. Taiwan’s lack of public transportation within its lesser cities has made the personal scooter and car prerequisite. The island is smothered in its traffic. In many cities, walking has been made prohibitive by lack of sidewalks. It is often futile to walk around looking for spots to people watch, unless you watch them, like koi in an overstuffed pond at feeding time, clamor up at intersections. You are safest if you are straddling some sort of moving contraption.

There are many sounds. There is the melding of languages in the markets, three tongues on land: Hakka, Taiwanese, and Mandarin, and all of the aboriginal languages in the mountains. There are the random and frequent firecrackers that either ward off ghosts or guide the ghosts home. As a Taiwanese acquaintance puts it, “firecrackers are multipurpose.” There are the elaborate street funerals that can go on for days; that can cause traffic swells whose caravans of drummers charge through invisible throngs of ghosts as the deceased is chaperoned by a flank of solemn ladies playing tambourines.

There are the fresh heaps of shallow graves in the farm cemeteries that pepper the land. Shallow, so that the bones can be exhumed and pulverized to be placed in the previously mentioned red glowing altar rooms. There are the myriad of superstitions that, if I allow them, make the weight of the Taiwanese cosmology sink me under their homespun metaphors. I’ve been in three big earthquakes in four months because they say that under the island there is a snoozing cow rolling over. There are three protective flames that sit on my shoulder-head-shoulder and if I might turn my head, at night, when a stranger calls my name, I will extinguish them. A zombie cold will infuse me and usher in my physical and/or spiritual death. There is the back that I must not pat while playing mahjhong for that person will never win his fortune; or the pregnant woman’s back that I must not even touch for fear that I will knock the baby out. There is the light in the front of my school that I must never turn off, and the stairwell I must always go down and never up, and the old thing that’s just easier to follow and silly to question. I suspect there is consolation in having this acceptance of things.

Move with it and don’t question, that’s a lesson I try to heed. Michael likes to say that around us there is all this invisible (but photographic) potential. Wherever you are, whatever stage of story, project, or chapter in life, some of the hard work is honing your divining rod toward that potential, and to eventually dig under the flowers and come up with something substantially different, something that nourishes you. Four months in, this is what it is, digging around the foot of a formidable mountain that but occasionally emerges in full view. The hardest work really isn’t ever photographic in nature. It is in learning about this place and letting the photos froth up out of that experience. This Taiwan chapter, so far, is going to be about connecting the images to the eventual understanding of what is actually going on around us. As foreigners that might be the best we can hope for. Maybe that’s the best anyone can hope for.

The thing that has stuck with me most about this book though isn’t the photographs, but a paragraph from the photographer’s introduction:

“many years ago while at a friend’s house, I was watching a film on television called Scott of the Antarctic. Outside, a fierce snowstorm raged. The TV set was positioned close to a window, which created an uncanny relationship between the snowy TV screen and the actual snow pelting the windowpane. In the movie, Scott and his crew trudged blindly through a blizzard to their demise. After the film, I left the apartment and headed home. To my surprise, all public transportation was halted because of the storm. I had to walk home five miles through an onslaught of sleet and snow. When I finally arrived, my feet were nearly frozen. Today, the blurring between the urban landscape and the mediascape increasingly typifies our world.”

As I read this paragraph, I was treated to an extremely vivid flashback from one of my first travelling experiences from 2000 – a surreal two days in Hong Kong.

Late in the evening on September 10th, 2000, I touched down into Hong Kong airport, my gateway to a month travelling in China. I passed through the gleaming new terminal, with its polished metal and glass in stark contrast to Heathrow just 15hrs earlier, and boarded an express train to Hong Kong island. It was raining heavily, and through the rain on the windows I could see the lights of residential skyscrapers clinging to the sides of the bays.

Eventually the train entered a long tunnel, and at the subterranean main terminus I changed onto a metro line that took me beneath the straits and into Tsim Sha Tsui. I climbed the stairs from the station to the street into a world of neon and torrential rain, the streets still busy with pedestrians and food stalls. I was instantly reminded of a scene from Bladerunner where Harrison Ford eats noodles from a street side cafe while rain pours down around him.

I didn’t have any accommodation reserved, but I knew that I wanted to stay in either Mirador or Chungking Mansions, both of them huge city blocks populated by tailors, guesthouses and restaurants. They’re well known for having the cheapest accommodation for travellers in Hong Kong.

I checked into a tiny hotel room deep inside Mirador Mansions. There was literally enough room to drop my backpack on the floor, fall onto a single bed, and squeeze past a tiny door into a shower/toilet area. There were no windows, and it was stifling hot. I had to sit on the toilet to use the shower. The whole unit seemed to have been created from a mould, and then stuck together with a few rivets. Somehow, the owners had managed to squeeze a tiny television into the top corner of the room at the end of the bed. I felt really claustrophobic and tired, but at the same time wired with energy from travelling and being in a new, strange environment. I stretched out as much as I could on the tiny bed, and switched on the TV.

I had to do a double take – without even changing channel, I realised I was watching the very scene from Bladerunner that I had thought about just 15 minutes previously as I stepped out of the tube station. For a few seconds I was perturbed and bewildered – for at that moment my life seemed to be mimicking a movie.

8 years later and the whole experience is still there in my memory in total clarity. Joel Meyerowitz (in “Creating a Sense Of Place“) wrote about how each time he pressed the shutter for a photograph, a lifetime’s worth of experience is imbued into the making of that image. For me, the “Hong Kong Bladerunner Experience” is a memory that flashes back regularly when I think about photographing, although I have never been able to put my finger on why that’s the case. I don’t think that this specific experience has had a profound influence on the way that I photograph, but I find it interesting how certain experiences and memories retain their clarity and take on a significance above and beyond the myriad of encounters and occurences that we experience through our lives.

Do you have a specific memory that stands out above and beyond others? Have you ever seen the boundaries between the real world and a fictional world become blurred?