erhebung

MCMP Redux #6

I drafted this back in October, and then promptly forgot about it (it’s been a strange couple of months):

I took this pho­to­graph late one morning, or maybe early one after­noon. I was with another foreign teacher at the time, and while we’d been eating we had both noticed that we were being watched by a group of wait­resses and waiters in the res­taurant opposite. It is quite common in China for Chinese people to watch for­eigners, but this group of young people were notable for the intensity of their curi­osity: they watched us the entire time we ate our noodles, from begin­ning to end, unflinching, indefatig­able. So, imme­di­ately on leaving the noodle res­taurant in which I’d been eating some very good beef noodles (it was a Muslim res­taurant, I think), I dashed over the road and took a few pho­to­graphs of our audience. This frame was the last one, and I’m happy that after the initial shock of me walking straight towards them, camera in hand, snapping pho­to­graphs, they each quickly accepted their sudden meta­morph­osis from observer into observed, relaxed, and smiled.

Past install­ments of MCMP Redux can be found here.

Yinchuan, 2008.

MCMP Redux #5

I think this was taken on the night I decided to walk from school to the apart­ment, rather than take a taxi. It was a good walk: cold, and further than I’d expected, but full of good light and inter­esting things. I’m not sure what the policeman was doing.

Earlier install­ments of MCMP Redux can be found here. A new install­ment will be posted in a little while.

Lanzhou, 2008.

MCMP Redux #4

An art teacher in sec­ondary school told me that if I really wanted to get great pho­to­graphs, I had to wake up very early in the morning and walk some­where. It is good advice, but has always been hard advice for me to follow because I’m not very good in the morning: I prefer the hours of the night. But some­times I do manage to get up early, and when that happens I try to take pho­to­graphs, remem­bering the teacher.

I took the pho­to­graph in this edition of MCMP Redux while heading to work very early one January morning. I remember I was shiv­ering at the time and I think I made about six expos­ures of the same com­pos­i­tion, bracing the camera in dif­ferent ways each time, as I was worried my hand wouldn’t be steady enough to get a sharp image at 1/​15th of a second. Once content I had some­thing on film, I marched down the road, jumped onto a cold bus, and thought about coffee.

Lanzhou, 2008.

MCMP Redux #3

Lanzhou is usually quite cold in January and February, but in the January and February of 2008 it was par­tic­u­larly cold. My strongest memories are of walks while wearing layers of thermals (one thin and one thick, at least — mobility was limited), sudden retreats into warm res­taur­ants (my glasses would always steam up), and feet-​stomps at the entrances of shops (sticky snow and ice would cake itself to everything). In the evenings, Liu Bing and I played Company of Heroes (LAN battles, one-​on-​one — immense fun) in a small and smoky net bar (our tem­porary accom­mod­a­tion was warmer but lacked internet), fuelling ourselves with one kuai cups of coffee. In the days, we would go on excur­sions, tramping down icy streets in search of elusive targets we’d marked on our map, rarely finding what we’d set out to find, but usually finding some­thing. It was during one such excur­sion that I found a bookshop full of yellowed foreign classics, buying (or rescuing) a col­lec­tion of Joseph Conrad’s sea stories (this one — I recom­mend it very highly), some Sherlock Holmes (beau­tiful and inex­pensive Chinese editions), and some­thing else — possibly another Conrad, maybe Nostromo; or possibly Bleak House.

And there were pho­to­graphs, too. I took the pho­to­graph below (the third install­ment of MCMP Redux) on the way home one night. Liu Bing and I were waiting for some street food (Lanzhou had some very good street food, but it wasn’t always easy to find) and I was circling around the stall trying to keep warm. The lit curving struc­tures (the example in the pho­to­graph is but one: there were others dotted all over the city) fas­cin­ated me, and after I read Typhoon or The Shadow Line I may have fancied them to be the broken ribs of some ancient sunken wreck; or maybe that is just how I see them now.

Lanzhou, 2008.

MCMP Redux #2

Yinchuan is the captial city of Ningxia, an autonomous region created for the Hui people (China has five autonomous regions, the other four being Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang). I lived and worked in Yinchuan for about three weeks in 2007, exper­i­en­cing a little of the local culture and pho­to­graphing some of its people and places. This pho­to­graph captures some­thing of how I remember it feeling to be there: white light and open space. If it had a soundtrack, it would be the Stanton Warriors remix of ‘Feel Good Inc.’, a track by Gorillaz that I first heard while wan­dering through city one bright winter’s afternoon.

Some back­ground on MCMP Redux can be found in the first install­ment of the series.

Yinchuan, 2007.

MCMP Redux #1

When I came back to Xi’an in 2007 I had a stash of newly-​bought black and white film, mainly Neopan 1600, and a stash of mostly-​expired colour film, mainly Provia 400F. I knew what I wanted to do with the black and white, most of it even­tu­ally being used to create new images for Our Life Is Not a Movie; but the colour was sitting in a corner of the apart­ment with no real purpose. I wanted to create some­thing coherent with it and so during the day (I worked on Our Life Is Not a Movie at night, mostly) began pho­to­graphing scenes that seemed better suited to colour than the scenes I was putting onto the Neopan 1600. After a little devel­oping and scanning, I decided to put the images together in a project more personal than Our Life Is Not a Movie, a project related to my being in China. I remembered a book I had once seen in a Chinese bookshop: My Country, My People by Lin Yutang. And so I had a title. And for the rest of the year I con­tinued to make pho­to­graphs for both projects, some­times loading a camera with fresh Neopan, some­times loading it with expired Provia. And then I stopped.

I may have stopped because I felt that I had come to a pause in the project, tent­ative edits I’d put together with dif­ferent col­lab­or­ators sug­gesting com­plete­ness or closure. More likely I stopped because other things were hap­pening: at the begin­ning of 2008 I trav­elled with Liu Bing to Xinjiang, and after that I began working in various cities across the China, finally ending up in a per­manent job in Hanzhong, a small city in the south of Shaanxi Province. Life was changing. During that time — that time of drifting and settling, and then drifting again — I was pho­to­graphing mainly in colour, on colour print (either Superia or Lucky, a Chinese brand, or occa­sion­ally on some trans­par­ency film left over from my time in South Korea) because during that time I seemed to be seeing, visu­al­ising, in colour (the move to colour was in part a response to coming to a black and white dead end after Our Life Is Not a Movie — I needed a tangent). But at the time I didn’t put that colour work — pho­to­graphs taken mainly in the west and north of China — together with the pho­to­graphs I had taken for My Country, My People: they felt like they were part of a dif­ferent time, and so they went into dif­ferent edits. Looking back at the dif­ferent sets of pho­to­graphs now, I can see that they all connect. And so we come to MCMP Redux.

MCMP Redux is exactly what the title suggests: a restored (rebooted, maybe), version of a series I first thought about in 2007. I don’t see MCMP Redux as a finished, edited piece, and don’t think it would be bene­fi­cial to squeeze it into a frame­work that insists on a begin­ning and a middle and an end; instead, I see it as some­thing of a rattle bag. The Rattle Bag, a col­lec­tion of poetry edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, was a book I read con­stantly when I was at school, its pages providing me with a constant flow of enter­taining and inspiring and chal­len­ging material. It was designed in such a way that it didn’t need to be read in any par­tic­ular order, but rather could be opened at random just rummaged through freely. My copy had a green cover (here is a jpeg of the cover of my edition at a terribly low res­ol­u­tion) and thick, heavy pages, and a deeply frac­tured spine. It played an unspeak­ably large part in making me who I am today, and in a sense MCMP Redux is playing a big part in helping me under­stand who I am today, so it is appro­priate that the two things should meet.

So, MCMP Redux will be made of episodes, pages of a book, but the story has no sched­uled end, and the pages are not in any specific order (the posts will be numbered for prac­tical purposes, and the images will have captions giving location and year, but beyond that the images will be unbound, undir­ected). Some of it will be new, some of it old, but all of it will tie back to the central idea of exploring, through pho­to­graphs, my rela­tion­ship with my place. The first pho­to­graph, a pho­to­graph from Xinjiang, is below, and more pho­to­graphs will follow, sometime soon, semi-​regularly.

Near Tulufan, 2008.