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The City is a Cypher

I’ve not been taking many pho­to­graphs lately, but I haven’t felt a lack. And as I’ve men­tioned here before, when I do take pho­to­graphs, I’m usually just doc­u­menting some­thing: these days I don’t feel com­pelled, or oblig­ated, to make pho­to­graphs, just take them. The dis­tinc­tion might seem slight, but it is a dis­tinc­tion, in my mind. The six pho­to­graphs below are from the last couple of months and have been placed together along some lines (decoding some­thing?) but are really just fragments.

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To Bangalore

The extremely great Jon Madison is going to Ban­galore to take pho­to­graphs. He already has a fair few, but if, like me, you want to see what happens when a master of mad light and mad colour is let loose in India, take a look at his project on Kick­starter and throw him some cash. If they accept PayPal, I’ll be donating immin­ently. Def­in­itely a project worthy of your con­sid­er­a­tion. (Have a safe trip, Jon!)

Late Nights

I’ve always been a night person, my brain working better in the second half of the day than in the first. Right now, as I write this, it is night, past midnight, and it feels like a good hour. And I’ve always been drawn to taking pho­to­graphs at night: the light and shadows, the sounds, the atmo­sphere. Below are two pho­to­graphs I took on my way home from the office a few days ago. They do a fairly good job of cap­turing how it felt that night.

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More Tangshan

I’ve not been taking many pho­to­graphs lately as the feeling hasn’t been there. But I do still carry a camera with me (a small, 500 RMB digital compact by Fuji), and some­times I see some­thing I want to record: some­thing in the light, usually, or an arrange­ment of objects, or some­thing my eye simply finds pretty. At other times I can hear some­thing in a song that leads to a pho­to­graph; occa­sion­ally some­thing I see in a film will cause me to take a pho­to­graph; and some­times just the sound of trains on the wind at night can cause me to dig out the camera. The stimuli are various.

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Days and Nights

Lately the days have been busy, mainly with teaching, but also, when it has been possible to free myself from the clutches of the office, with books and films and games. Pho­to­graphy hasn’t taken up a large slice of my time, but I have occa­sion­ally brought out the camera to take a pho­to­graph, or two. Below are two of the pho­to­graphs I’ve taken since arriving in Tangshan. They’re quite ordinary, bland perhaps, but they do capture some­thing of my days and nights in this place (which is not to say my days and nights are either ordinary or bland — far from it). More might follow, if I see the light, so to speak.

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Canned Peaches Are Sometimes Enough

I wrote this a few days ago, but forgot to post it:

There is a time for single malt, and a time for rough Swedish vodka; a time for exquis­itely mar­in­ated steak (cooked on a flaming barbecue in a USAF base in South Korea, prefer­ably — but that’s another story), and a time for canned peaches. Films are similar: some are like single malts, others like canned peaches. Tonight I felt like a can of peaches, my brain too weary, too fatigued with nonsense, to appre­ciate anything else, and so I watched The Crazies, a film about a sherrif strug­gling to survive as the town he serves goes insane around him. It was good, in its way, and ended on an pleas­ingly open-​ended note (there might be sequels?). Also, it starred Timothy Olyphant, an actor best known (I would imagine) for playing Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood. There was someone else from Deadwood in it, too, but I’ve for­gotten their name (one of the dope “fiends”).

I feel the same about pho­to­graphy, in a way, right now. Part of it may just be my own personal lack of inspir­a­tion; but a bigger part, I sense, is an unwill­ing­ness to immerse myself in pho­to­graphy of a really high quality. There is an issue with con­sump­tion, not just creation. Music, yes; lit­er­ature, yes; but pho­to­graphy, no. Some­times a fine single malt is great; but some­times you just want to get drunk; and at other times, alcohol just doesn’t appeal at all. With pho­to­graphy, for me, I either want to be com­pletely inebri­ated by what I see, or just not see anything; I’m not in the mood to savour a huge amount of subtlely con­structed, del­ic­ately composed, deeply mean­ingful work. This troubles me, at moments, but not enough to want to do anything to remedy the situ­ation, most probably because I feel very con­tented. So, other obses­sions are to be found. Painting, maybe. Or car­pentry. Or BMX biking. We will see.

Seoul Day Walk

So, I am in Seoul, but only for a very short time. Yes­terday I went for a wander, taking a few pho­to­graphs as I went. Hugo, a friend, told me that he had found it quite thera­peutic (that may not have been the word he used, but it was some­thing to that effect) to take pho­to­graphs of random objects (hose pipes, dustbins: that sort of thing) so I thought I’d do that, recording during my walk whatever caught my eye. When I got back to the hotel I had about a hundred images, most quite quiet (it was very quiet, the streets oddly unpeopled), some quite inter­esting (South Korea has a inter­esting colour scheme), some very dull (I wasn’t thinking very hard about com­pos­i­tion or content). Here are six:

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Seeing the Tending of Fields

I just read ‘Starting New Chapters’, an excel­lent essay by Hannah Pierce-​Carlson. Def­in­itely worth reading, if you haven’t already. Here is where it really caught my attention:

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.

What do we see, everyday, that we can’t see anywhere else?

Her diary of a cycling trip through China in 2007 is also full of inter­esting obser­va­tions.

Old Friends, Old Photographs

Last night was a night of Metric, everyone wanting to fall in love, everyone wanting to play the lead; and yes­terday, daytime, was a day of talking with old and dear and too-​long absent friends. And during one con­ver­sa­tion, someone asked how I achieved the look in the pho­to­graph below, and I explained that the figure was moving, and the camera was also moving, the camera fol­lowing the figure, and so everything else became blur, a wash of light; and that that the light of night had a greater intensity on film than the light of day. I think my friend described the pho­to­graph as hyper-​real. The music of Metric also has a greater intensity at night (as does much music). So: night and day; moving and tracking; clarity and blur; old friends, old photographs.

Xi’an, 2006.

Changes

More changes, it seems: in the next couple of days, I’ll be heading north-​easterly. I’m expecting it to be inter­esting. Today the plan is to get some new clothes (it is cold out there), get a train ticket (it is quite far from here), and then drink some whiskey (Becky appar­ently has a bottle). We’ll have to see how it all goes.

The image below is two pho­to­graphs, or perhaps two vari­ations of the same pho­to­graph. On the left is a scan — a lab scan I tweaked, a little — of a frame from a roll of film exposed at the begin­ning of 2007; and on the right is another frame from that roll, but a frame I scanned myself (and tweaked, a little) a couple of weeks ago. I think I was going for a dif­ferent look (steeper curve, deeper blacks), the first time I saw the image. I like both.

Xi’an, 2007.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

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.