Territory
I’ve been thinking about ways to approach the photographs I’ve been shooting since the beginning of this year. It looks as though I’ve shot around 50 or 60 rolls between January, when Liu Bing and I went to Xinjiang, and August, when I visited London for a week. (If anyone is keeping track, about 12 of those are slide, 24 print film, the rest, probably between 16 and 20, black and white.) By the time I had left London, probably a day or two before I flew, I had decided, without really ever consciously deciding, that I was going to begin doing something a little different from September onwards; more precisely, the week back in the UK felt like a landmark, or pivot — I reached somewhere, in my head, and determined that it was time to push off in another direction. The side effect of feeling I was going off somewhere new was that the previous phase, January to August, needed to be dealt with. And thus I began thinking about, and am still thinking about, those 50 or 60 rolls.
When I hit Shanghai I made a few choices, picked up a lot of black and white film, and set off back to Xi’an charged with purpose — dig into the undeveloped bag of film and start pulling out shots. And out of that came Territory (not landscapes, but landscapes overlaid with boundaries and borders; and not the boundaries and borders of politics and history, civilisation and development, but the boundaries and borders, fragile and inchoate, of human necessities and desires, ideas and dreams), a first gasp of air taken by photographs that had been holding their breath for seven months. It is just a word, or an idea squeezed into a word, and it may not last; but I am interested to see what more will come as I gradually work through the backlog. Additionally, there will be newer work, shot as I am processing the older work, and the two may well interact. Daunting though it may sound, I am looking forward to steadily scanning through the seven months that saw me in Xinjiang, Lanzhou, Hanzhong, Yinchuan, and also, in the weeks following the earthquake, in Xi’an.
And as I write this I am in Xi’an. I had to come back again for a little health check (a check related to my work visa — nothing worrying), but the biggest motivation for returning, for me, was to finally relocate the bulk of my things to Hanzhong — this may be the last time for quite some time that I am a resident in Xi’an (I’m sure I’ll make occasional appearances here as a visitor). And there was a further incentive to come: in Xi’an there is a very good lab, and so while here I have had processed all of the colour film I’ve exposed since January, both slide and print (remarkably, it only took 400 pieces of Chinese money and a couple of hours waiting). The sight of all those photographs — some forgotten, some not — stacked up in plastic sleeves was a little strange: I had become very comfortable with the notion that they were neatly wound up in their scratched and crudely annotated cannisters, unseen; after they had been released back into the light of day (from light to dark and back to light — simple and pleasantly symmetrical) it struck me that they had suddenly become far more demanding entities. They require attention. (They’re calling now, from the bag, but I’m trying to ignore them — no scanner, here, so nothing I can do for them but stare and tease with the possibility of release.)
[Update: a new post on related matters can be found here.]