insig.ht » Features

On (Not) Being Able to Put Your Finger On It

Hannah Pierce-Carlson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:25:27 +0000

Every time my husband attempts to utter something in Chinese, I don’t exactly laugh in his face, but it’s a little funny. He hasn’t yet got the phonetics. His mouth over-rounds and it seems as if he makes new shapes, any shape, to account for the language’s new sounds. But it’s all in the tongue, sweety. Control the tongue and the mouth shape follows accordingly, like a lone trailing gymnast’s foot on a soft blue mat adjusting for the landing. Likewise, a bounding Nadia knows that the feat of her perfect landing is really all in the strength of her back. Those pretty extended limbs are graceful distractions from an otherwise brutal exertion of power.

Underneath all things, as in communication, as in gymnastics, there is a structure that can’t be manipulated from the outward going in. There is no forcing the mouth to look like a talking Chinese mouth in order to make the sounds come out in Chinese. Telling a joke or a story is obviously no different. It requires no less than a seemingly hidden consistency. If you tell a joke and it wins a laugh, then you’ve told it right. But what exactly is telling-it-right? “I can’t put my finger on it,” goes the idiom. I can’t touch the underlying organ that governs telling-it-right’s awesome landing to my ears. But I know it when I hear it; and, in photography, I know telling-it-right when I see it.

Jacob…K hails from flickr. From what I gather, he’s a Funny Dad, an FD. Some of his photos make me laugh like no others made by more “serious” photographers. When he lands a good one, his images are super concentrated scenes of American weirdness. He calls them “silly pictures” in his profile and sometimes I jealously wish I had taken them. He takes his kids, or ventures alone, to strange Deep South U.S.A amusement venues, and catalogs them fairly tirelessly. Here are two scenes that may well summarize the gamut of American fervency. A.) Sitting among Collectible Cabbage Patch doll owners as they watch the “birth” of a doll in a “hospital” in Georgia known as Babyland General and B.) A “funeral” from a hard line Christian youth event called Eternity House where participants are goaded into “knowing Jesus” might their souls be eternally damned.

Wandering at large, there are many FDs taking pictures of weird Americana and posting them to flickr, but Jacob…K has consistency that allows me to appreciate them. The moment’s often right, the composition isn’t too heavy-handed, nor is it too loose. Everyone’s perfectly who they need to be to make the scene snap together. His organ of telling it right maybe works like this: he goes to these outlandish places ready to laugh, and he snaps the funniness that he sees in front of him, doing nothing more than transferring that scene into the frame at just the right moment.

I don’t take for granted how difficult getting that moment really is. My husband and I have often used the phrase, “I can’t make a picture out of it,” despite the richness of a particular scene in front of us. What it suggests is that a picture is not “there” by default of the availability of interesting ingredients floating freely in front of you. Our vision of the elusive moment is sometimes obscured by other factors, let’s say the impassioned “not feeling it” barrier to getting in the frame what’s so plainly in front of us. There is also the mitigating fear that if we work it too much, we break it. More notably, there is the plain oblivion that we are mostly always in. There are more obscuring elements at work on how we see than there are clarifying ones. When a photographer consistently gets in the frame what’s really in front of him/her, at a time when it’s most significant, this is akin to landing that back handspring or finally being able to communicate something useful in a foreign language. It is no accident that it is achieved, it is owned only by the trudging through a trail of previous wipe-outs.

Mark Powell is a photographer who consistently lands his handsprings. The funniness of his photographs, like that of Jacob…K’s, is ratcheted-up by a real moment and keen framing. However, Powell’s pictures usually depart from the mere touch of comic timing. His overall vision, the arch of his entire body of work, operates on a way of seeing that transcends the obviously funny. There’s little reliance on being in a funny place to see a funny moment, but rather he makes funny where we’d never expect it could be. It’s a funniness about life that’s really a bit harder to put your finger on.

This is funny to me: her portable TV, its cord hanging limply, the weird little flower arrangements, her hair-netted head cocked in what seems like a temporarily adequate escape from some other thing going on in her life at the moment, I presume. Or this older boy, grown too big, straddling the last toy vestiges of his being a boy in a manner that anticipates the way in which he will try to be a man. They’re both so tenderly funny in that way we once described as the “human condition.”

This man smiling into a mirror is funny immediately and then it’s funny again in a different way, when I imagine Powell actually being there to take it.

A humor that engulfs the mere chuckle is a more somber universal one. There is a joke on us that everyday unfurls itself under our feet, potentially undermining our ego at any given moment. This humor finds its expression in pathos and self-deprecation. I might argue that even if we have to mine these self-deprecating punch lines from the guarded moments of innocent bystanders, does not the miner hold the eyes to see the gold? That is, how can we see what we don’t already know for ourselves? At the base of us all is something a bit helpless and pathetic, which somehow makes laughing at others okay. We laugh at babies when they fall and the delayed agony takes grip on their face before we finally hear the cries. We laugh because we know it’s never real agony.

The go-to American humorist, Mark Twain, wrote, “Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” Is that wisdom the ability to quickly index the catalog of everyday lived absurdity and grief, pull out something amusing, and then charge on blithely?

When looking through Powell’s work, or any photographer I admire, it seems as if they could find a quiet absurdity anywhere they end up. Around any corner, potentially, a Powell, or an Eggleston, or a Whoever X scene awaits, or so it seems. Are they teleologically in with the universe or does the the universe disproportionately offer things up just for them to find? That answer is “No,” but perhaps a photographer like Powell might be receptive to the universe (a set of possibilities by another name) in a way that his/her vision for what’s already there is less obscured than those who might choose to impose on the scene, rather than to humble themselves to it.

I wrote Mark Powell and other photographers who take humorous pictures to see what they had to say about humor and (not) being able to put your finger on it. I also wanted to see what images that they find funny. Here’s what Powell gave me.

Powell: “I do like a direct funny picture, but the quick laughs die an equally quick death. I have a hard time remembering jokes no matter how funny they are–the ones I do remember are a little dirty and twisted. So, I picked an Enrique Metinides photograph of an accident scene and the people gathered around a smashed up car. Well at once, I find it funny that Metinides always implicates the people in his photographs until they are not even about the accidents anymore, but just about the people left over, gathered like flies. He uses accidents as a very practical excuse to get the shot that extends meaning a little over the horizon of the event. I like that punch line, it lingers over me and allows me to watch again and again.”

Powell’s response reminds me that humor, when it’s forced to be laid out, ends up in a buffet of adjectives: sick, twisted, fluffy, witty, dark, satiric, ironic, cute, straight, absurd, weird, stupid, slapstick, funny haha, funny strange; and essentially, like fussy kids we only eat what we like. I hate listing these adjectives. When I see them, there seems to be a glaring limitation to all these one-note words. Perhaps the effect of funniness is best demonstrated physically, rather than lexically. Because there’s not always an outward laugh, perhaps nothing even close to one, laughing on the inside is more what goes on. A laugh like this escapes in a huff from the nostrils, or causes a muscle to tense on one side of the face, leaving the other side of the face in something like a non-smile, a huff-smirk.

Powell said he’s a little twisted, and though I suspect that adjective hardly describes what he means, but Mark, I know what you mean. There is a playful darkness to us photographers, and I should now mention it via drawing an anachronistic metaphor…

…If this dark sense of humor could be our anthem, and we were all sitting in a dusty parlor room swaying to it… It’d be the sound of tinkling un-tuned keys of a warbly old player piano (a piano that plays itself) at which sits our man, a drunken character whose biggest fault is loving too many things with too much gusto, the kind of character who pretends like he has never fully learned his lessons so that he can take what he wants and run away to someplace alone to pride himself for having grabbed it– but he has half-hearted accepted his foolishness for the miraculous glimmers it sometimes offers to his perception, a fun house mirror set of eyes in which to fumble through the world– with his hands fumbling over the keys, believing he was the master of the tune himself. We’d laugh to ourselves, at our pathetic kin, and we might love him for being so photogenically pathetic in front of us.

Mark Twain on the photograph and, presumably, the devils who make them:

“No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody–hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a “negative”–a contradiction–a misrepresentation–a falsehood. I speak feeling of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither.” – Letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, July 1, 1866

Eliot Shepard comes to mind when I read these lines. I think of the title of his small set “Basically Dishonest” and how these two words ring true, and yet it still matters little to me. Oddly, I sometimes trust that my photographic lies make my lived truth more easily seen, if to anybody, then to me only. Honesty, whatever that means, probably doesn’t matter so much to Shepard either.

Shepard thinks these pictures are funny: Winogrand gets a taste of his own medicine and a cheeseburger-cigarette holding hand. It’s not hard to see how his own images are imbued by a familiar strange sensibility.

Zhang Xiao is a photographer shooting around the central Chinese province of Shanxi. His pictures are understated and fixedly Chinese, whatever being Chinese means. There is no hand-holding the audience to the punch line and the humor is not concentrated like a good ol’ FD picture. Rather, there is an atomized vapor of weirdness hovering over all of his scenes. And not being so easily got, the humor may waft over the heads of some and it might shoot directly into the nasals of others. “A humorous story is told gravely,” writes Twain in How to Tell a Story, “…the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” And don’t Zhang Xiao’s gravely-told stories almost whisper their awkward punchlines?

However, I was caught off guard when I received what Zhang Xiao sent. He writes,

“My friend FengLi’s picture often make me laugh…I see this picture, I think this is a surreal scene. The children are too fat. It has been very funny just he lying there. Don’t need too many reasons. And this isn’t ridicule. He is so lovely.”

At first I was interested, and then I was gradually confused, and finally, sad. I can’t say that the image sits on my side of the funny buffet. Zhang Xiao’s pallet might be more darkly noted than mine. I’m an FD at heart, but yet I’m capable of accepting how this can be funny to someone coming from another range of cultural and personal contexts, those that I can’t quite grasp, nor do I really want to. To paraphrase my insig.ht comrade, James Hendrick, knowing that someone somewhere thinks this picture is funny, I’ve learned something.

What is humorous within photographs is only half the story when we compare it to what is funny about the practice of photography itself. I’ve often thought, as I stand dorkily holding my camera up to a scene involving no more than a pile of stuff, how funny I must look to anyone who cares to pay more than a second’s glance. How often would I make a lampoon-able character for a funny photo? No other online work, in my opinion, has poked more gentle fun at the act of playing photographer than the self-reflexive writing, photographs, and experiments of the funny Ross Evertson. He keeps a highly readable blog called “Addressing the Vest” (an overly pocketed classic photojournalist meets amateur birder vest) in which he muses/embraces various deservedly mocked photographic tropes, such as this touchstone: “Imply Significance for Free.”

“Statements” is one of the more clever and funny projects I’ve seen. It’s an experiment that treads that awkward bridge between worlds: between those of the artist and his/her audience; between those of the people who take photography seriously and people who might be indifferent to its supposed significance; and uniquely, between the outsourcer and the outsourcee by using overseas paid-for-hires to write a 2nd hand artist statement for his work. He writes:

“Using the Amazon outsourcing service Mechanical Turk, I hired workers to visit my website and describe my work. The results were then typeset and printed, including the unedited text of the responses, along with the associated, anonymous worker number.”

I conclude by trying to redeem myself for making fun of my husband’s funny Chinese pronunciation by telling you this story of his, which I love and always makes me laugh. It’s about photography, or rather about being a photographer, and the seriousness to which we clamor for a photographic nugget lying ready to be plundered. It’s about how being a photographer can make you experience the world in ways that are in their own way funny, funnier than if we just mentally noted something and kept walking, likely forgetting anything worth a longer consideration, however small, however maybe ridiculous.

Michael was walking around his then NYC neighborhood. He came across a bull dog sitting in an old glass shop front like a yard ornament. The dog was petrified, transfixed, weirdly not-real with his saliva downward looping to just almost the ground. Michael must have laughed the kind that comes out short and hard, like a honk. Without a camera, his pulse surged and his photographer’s shoulder devil must have shouted, Fuck! So he took to a fast walk in the direction home, soon turning to a full on sprint, weaving through the intermittently populated lazy obstacles of the sidewalk, around the usual slow oblivious types, running with what must have been a bouncing smile on his face, with an urgency in his heart to get home to that camera.

Charging down the long forever blocks and finally pounding up the front steps, jangling with the the keys through the front door, and then another five flights up, around and around the stairwell he went, and then jangling with the keys again, he charged into the apartment running headlong into his friend, Cary Conover, also a photographer. Cary: “What’s wrong, man?” Michael: “Picture! Picture! Picture….” yelling as he carried on. Cary: “Oh, yeah, go get it.”

In and out of doors, and in and out of camera bags with zippers and pockets. And then down and back through all of it again, racing to what he knew would be long gone, in a full sprint, already admonishing himself for not having had the camera he should be carrying all along, if he were any photographer worth his salt. The smile turning to a strain attached to a mental projection of a failed opportunity, to the thought that maybe it’s pointless to run to a thing already dissipated, that it is plain silly to even be running to take a picture of a dog? It was really ridiculous when he thought about it. But still he begged the universe of chance: Please, still be there. Please, still be there. And then he arrived, after twenty minutes of self-inflicted entropic chaos, to the scene as serene and perfect as when he first saw it, an unflinching bulldog in a window in a funny world that sometimes might wait for you to get the joke. Sometimes you get your finger right on it.

So tell me, what’s funny to you?

Artists Flock to Starling Flocks

Michael David Murphy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:41:12 +0000

We can all agree that the real world is a tremendous place and every once in awhile you get to see something that’s jaw-droppingly extraordinary. What’s fascinating is when a multiplicity of artists see the exact same thing, use cameras to capture it, and call it art.

Flocking starlings are one of nature’s visual wonders, and lately, I’ve seen four artists who make work about the pesky birds. In substance, there’s no real difference between the four starling-art examples, each depicts starlings flocking as they prepare to nest for the evening.

Photographer Massimo Cristaldi photographed starlings in a dramatic location where they can be interpreted as smoke billowing from a refinery.

Mixed-media artist Laurent Grasso has an 8-minute video of starlings. Interestingly (and more substantively) he’s created a body of work called “studies into the past” where he paints scenes straight out of an art history textbook with extra, non-traditional elements, like an influx of starlings from his video.

“One of his most well known works, Les Oiseaux, depicts a flock of starlings filmed in the dusk sky above Rome. Taken out of its natural context, the flock of birds resembles an ionic particle field, moved as if by unseen magnetic waves.”

More traditionally, photographer Richard Barnes’ series “Murmur” shows starlings flocking in stills of black-and-white.

Multimedia artist Suki Chan likes starlings, too. She made a “single-screen & multi-screen High Definition video” of starlings flocking, and stills from the film are available as well. Suki’s work was featured on the BBC, in the art-competition reality show “School of Saatchi”.

Below, reality show judge and messy-bed artist Tracy Enim asks Suki if the starlings are bats, while curator Kate Bush asks what the difference is between Suki’s piece and “a nature documentary”.

Each of these examples offer clearly rendered depictions of starlings in flight. HD in one case (and probably two: Grasso’s) and two photographers who are using great cameras to capture clear, descriptive images.

Yet, when you dive into the deep-end of video sites to watch starlings, examples run the gamut from well-produced nature documentaries, to exploratory first-person monologues beneath starlings, to pure low-fi amazement.

Really Wild Looking Flock Of Birds

My question is, how do starlings, as a fine art subject, differ from the kids/puppies/rainbows of the amateur-photography set? They’re readymade for audience response, right? The artist/photographer is just delivering nature to the screen, book, or gallery wall (and maybe with a dash of ethereal audio for a soundtrack).

Beyond waterfalls, stalactites, and phospherescent fish, what other natural subjects quickly offer themselves for metaphorical renderings by contemporary artists? If you were to make pictures of flocking starlings for exhibition and sale, would you think you were the first photographer to exhibit photographs of starlings? Does being the first to make work of a particular subject matter? These days, is it more important if you’re the most recent?

This is the first starlings video I saw, years ago — and interstitial titles aside, it still wows me with its pixellated glory. Perhaps the trick is to capture something truly extraordinary and not call it art, eh?

More wall or less wall

Hin Chua — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:11:51 +0000

One of my greatest photographic pleasures is getting together with a few savvy individuals and a box of prints and then proceeding to disembowel, dissect and reconstitute the latter (doing it to the former would be self-defeating). I most recently did this with Ben Roberts: we lay a bunch of prints from his series The Gathering Clouds on my floor one afternoon and whipped up an effective initial edit in about half an hour.

However, in these cases you’re usually dealing with fully formed, relatively mature images that have already made it through several quality gates. You’re trying to decide which of several very different scenes works best in a specific sequential context. But sometimes I want to play this game at a lower level: to identify which particular representation of a scene works most effectively. To pick a champion who may or may not survive the great gladiatorial struggle to find a proper place within a larger body of work.

William Eggleston famously claimed he only made one photograph per scene because he found the process of selecting a ‘winner’ too difficult. Several years ago, when I was still coming to grips with the way I worked, I showed several contact sheets to an established, considerably well-renowned photographer.

“You’re only making one or two exposures in settings where I think you need to take more to truly get a feeling for the compositional possibilities. I don’t buy Eggleston’s spiel and even if it’s true, I hate to tell you this but you’re not him. You’re no genius, you might miss something and what could seem the ideal composition at the time may not remain as ideal upon further reflection. And then you’ll be left without enough material and you’ll never really know if you could have done any better.

Besides, you’re shooting medium format, you don’t have to carry the cross that a 8×10 photographer bears. You cannot and should not get away with ‘just’ dragging yourself to a location, methodically setting up your camera, making a single exposure and then relying on that large format goodness to compensate for a sub-optimal or conservative composition. Don’t settle for less especially when you have more flexibility… give yourself some bloody options”.

So, if resolved to make multiple photographs of a scene, how could I get better at making and then picking the “best” one? While clearly a loaded and some would say fundamentally unanswerable question, one tactic I’ve found to work in certain scenarios is to walk away from the location and return straight away (possibly from a different path). Because you’re effectively starting all over again, you can reassess the entire composition and free yourself from any creative corners you may have painted yourself into.

When it comes to analysing actual images, I learned a few things from my peers. One was to free yourself temporarily from the intricate details of a photo (that so many individuals obsess over) and concentrate solely on form. By squinting and allowing the image to become indistinct, you can make distinctions based purely on primary shapes, the broader brush strokes.

Going further, comparing photographs which are viewed upside down AND reflected in a mirror can disassociate yourself entirely from their contextual baggage, separating completely their connection with reality.

Many people can just rely on contact sheets and a decent loupe. I still resort to making screen-sized scans of my negatives and use software like Aperture or Lightroom to quickly flip back and forth between variations and narrow the choices.

Regardless of how the approach, it can still be a very difficult process. I remember reading that Josef Koudelka took “proof prints of near misses, cut out all the elements in the image, and rearranged them – as a guide to the picture he should have taken”.

Here’s a recent email conversation I had with the insig.ht crew about a problem I had with two of my photographs:

Hin: Hi everyone, I’ve just had a big debate with my girlfriend about this pair of photographs taken in Chennai. Fundamentally, do you prefer the image with “more wall” or “less wall”?

Initially I went with “less wall”; the balance seemed off with “more wall”, it felt like there was too much dead space in the left of the scene. Then she convinced me that the ‘visual path’ of “more wall” is more effective: the larger amount of wall is better at leading your eye across the frame. I definitely see her point, but one part of me still prefers the compositional purity or starkness of “less wall”. And now it’s late and I’m exhausted and confused… so what are your thoughts and opinions?

Ben: I prefer the image where the wall dominates the frame: the closer crop. Go with your gut instinct!

Hannah: If it’s about the wall then, for me, it’s about the holes in the wall. Two holes in a wall is better than one, so more wall.

Michael: Two holes are better than one, yes.

James H: I keep going back and forth, but I think I prefer “less wall” overall. I like the two holes in “more wall”, but the bit of bush peeking over the leftmost segment weakens the picture for me. Also, in “less wall” there’s a more forceful contrast between the wall and the shrub in the foreground on the right and a more binary relationship between the wall and its natural surroundings. Because of the starkness of the “less wall” composition, the break in the wall seems more clearly articulated. I guess the “less wall” wall seems more dominant in the frame, which then underscores its fallenness. There’s more of a “once great” feeling, a greater sense of dramatic reversal.

James W: I’m going to agree with James H on the less wall is more argument. For me it came down to that second hole and bush peeking over the wall being a distraction from the grandness of the wall. The picture becomes more about the hole and less about the wall, and it’s the edge of the wall that is so bloody cool.

Hannah: Interesting to see which aspects of the image make it more or less effective as a photo for each of us. Compositionally we can trick anything into significance, but if the object itself actually has a significance or at least can suggest something about its significance (within a greater narrative), that to me, is what will make a photo. Does playing a game within the frame to make a vase of flowers more looming make the the fact that they’re flowers more significant?

It’s the subject that we see and should think about, the balance of the elements, the game of tension between elements, the way the eye moves in the service of the subject, in my opinion. If the subject is a ruin than what makes a ruin more ruined, or more something else? What is the subject to you, Hin?

James H: Hannah, you might just be intending a narrower sense of the word there, but can’t the subject be something we don’t directly observe? To me the subject of that picture is not the wall in its ruined state but rather its fall from a greater state. Not the pictured object itself but the change it has undergone, not the rubble but the collapse. What makes the “less wall” version work for me is that the composition succeeds better at suggesting the wall’s former grandeur, and it is the way this suggestion mingles with the pictured decay that conjures an impression of a change, a fall.

But I agree with you that the composition should serve the subject, and since it’s Hin that has to choose one composition over another, it’s his notion of the subject that counts. Loosely related, about landscape paintings of the Song dynasty in China:

“There was an abstract quality to the paintings that gives them a special appeal in the present day. The artists were not concerned with depicting nature accurately but rather with creating a highly personal vision of natural beauty. A premium was placed on subtlety and suggestion. For example, the winner of an imperial contest painted a lone monk drawing water from an icy stream to depict the subject announced by the emperor: a monastery hidden deep in the mountains during the winter.”

Hin: Thanks for the feedback, really thought provoking and it helped to crystallise how I and other people look at these photos.

Looking through my scans, it’s clear that my focus was less the entire wall than the edge of the wall: the gash that separates red brick from green. My first image is of the wall quite a way back, then I slowly get closer till all I have is just the edge and the shrubbery. You can see through the process that I’m trying to get the balance of concrete and green just right; for me it’s not one or the other, but both. The holes are important, but after further thought, one is sufficient, two is superfluous. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m going with “less wall”.

Sometimes when I’m literally or figuratively beating my head against a wall, I wonder if Eggleston was right. What are your approaches to making on on-the-spot compositional choices and later assessing your photographs?

Starting New Chapters

Hannah Pierce-Carlson — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:15:06 +0000

We’re delighted to introduce Hannah Pierce-Carlson as our newest regular contributor to insig.ht. Although you don’t see it, there is a continual hubbub of conversation in our back rooms and Hannah’s intelligence, lucidity and passion have been a wonderful addition to our little group. Welcome, Hannah!

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.

When fiction blurs with reality…

Ben Roberts — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:12:42 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Robert Walker’s book “Colour is Power”. It’s an absolute snip on amazon at the moment, and while his super saturated colour street scenes may not be to everyone’s taste, I find his jumbled compositions quite compelling.

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?