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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.

Twenty-​Ten

So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few inter­esting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm imper­man­ence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your con­sulta­tions:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an inter­esting year.

Mr. Chu

Around a year ago pH and I encountered Mr. Chu. Mr. Chu seemed to be present, albeit in dif­ferent personas, in six pho­to­graphs I had taken around that time: he was an Everyman, one single meta-​man who rep­res­ented many others. The idea was to present his story in Acts and Scenes, the first set of images the six scenes of the first act. The plan then was for more to follow, and more may yet follow; but for now Mr. Chu inhabits a place, a floating world, that is cur­rently off limits. This post is a memorial to Chu, wherever he may be. The captions below each pho­to­graph were created during the Gtalk chat that led to the creation of the set itself.

Scene One — “ONE, two, three, four, Mr. Chu thought as he walked the alley to the Bureau…”

Scene Two — “The head­lights silently approached and Mr. Chu wondered, for a moment, if they were coming for him…”

Scene Three — “As usual, on these nightly trips to his fate, Mr. Chu felt deeply the pain of the infinite commute towards darkness.”

Scene Four — “Mr. Chu had powers, he realised; it was just a matter of deciding how to use them.”

Scene Five — “He stood in the station as he always stood, Mr. Chu to himself, Mr. Chu to the rest of the world.”

Scene Six — “Later in life, Mr. Chu would look back on his failures and try to find out where he had wrong, how he had become the pianist who always hit the wrong keys.”

Singles #18

I took this pho­to­graph in the summer of 2008. It must have been in the evening as that window faced (still faces) west. Liu Bing was playing with her phone. Hugo was in the other room watching a film (Apo­ca­lypse Now Redux, probably — I remember us com­menting on its beau­tiful colours and won­dering which film stock they used). After­wards the three us ate — dumpings, possibly, or barbecue bought on a street near the apart­ment. I can’t remember the context with crystal clarity, but the pho­to­graph helps me to remember.

Hanzhong, 2008.

Prints of this pho­to­graph, and of other pho­to­graphs in Singles, are avail­able on request — email for details.

Singles #17

One night in the autumn of 2007 I was in a net bar editing some pho­to­graphs when out of the blue I got a call from a Polish guy asking if he and his girl­friend could crash at my place that very same night. It isn’t very often that requests are made by strangers for emer­gency accom­mod­a­tion, but I’d been in similar situ­ations myself and didn’t hesitate in allowing the two of them stay. And it turned out they were incred­ibly close: five minutes away on a bus that was bringing them from the train station to the Bell Tower. I quickly closed down what I was doing and dashed out to meet them. And so began my adven­ture with two new Polish friends, an adven­ture during which I took this, the sev­en­teenth pho­to­graph in Singles.

The location is one I pass through almost every time I return to Xi’an, but the bill­board, as far as I can tell, is no longer there.

Xi’an, 2007.

Prints of this one are avail­able, if you’re inter­ested — email for details — and earlier episodes, if we can call them that, of Singles can be found here.

Singles #16

Last year there was an earth­quake in Sichuan, an earth­quake that killed people, des­troyed homes, and created a wide­spread feeling of panic across many areas of China. I was in China at the time and exper­i­enced it, but luckily did not directly encounter either death or destruc­tion. I did, however, exper­i­ence the panic: my school was forced by the local gov­ern­ment to close for around a month and I was advised by my manager to stay else­where, if I could, as Hanzhong probably wasn’t very safe. I took this pho­to­graph during my short post-​earthquake exodus in Xi’an. The camera was most likely the OM-​2n, the film almost cer­tainly Lucky SHD 100.

Xi’an, 2008.

Singles #15

The Puget Sound […] is a sound or complex of inland marine water­ways in the north­western part of Wash­ington, United States, extending from the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca south to the head of the sound at the state capital of Olympia. It branches out from Admir­alty Inlet and Decep­tion Pass in the north to Olympia, Wash­ington in the south.[…] The term is also used to mean the general region of the sound, including the Seattle met­ro­pol­itan area, home to about 4.2 million people.

‘Puget Sound’, Wiki­pedia

Ever­green College, Olympia, 2007.

When I took that pho­to­graph I felt so com­pletely at ease, so com­pletely free from the idiocy that had sur­rounded me only a week or two earlier, that I didn’t fully register where I was: I could have been in country for all it mattered at the time. I had escaped some­thing, and where I had escaped to was almost incid­ental. That is how I remember it, anyway, looking back after two years. I’ll have to go back and explore the waters around Olympia more care­fully someday, taking in the place for what it is, appre­ci­ating its unique textures. Hope­fully Teresa, the girl sitting on the beach, can come too.