I have less right than anyone to talk about photography. For one thing I am rather lazy. I did not keep drilling into the world of photography, and I have not used every sense I have to finish anything to do with it. After a certain month in 1999 I have only taken so-called pictures of daily life, and from then on photographs split into daily-life pictures and not-daily-life pictures. I have not contributed anything to photography, nor finished any kind of achievement. I don’t know why I can’t do it, but there is no impulse in me to grow certain lives that way, and there is no action either. Still I want to leave some writing, to record everything about photography that is in my head.
What is photography? On the letter it is “light drawing” (a lot of books on photography mention this; I find the explanation rather interesting, and I can accept it) — a picture of light. What is photography? If you ask me now, I don’t know, because my standard keeps getting looser: from technical demand to shaking the camera as I like, allowing blur, even accepting electronic images. I don’t dare tell you what photography is, because later I may think very differently. In any case the outline isn’t even listed; this piece is being written a bit too loosely.
No winding history. I just started taking pictures
A lot of people love to tell this: how they walked into a line of work. I want to tell it too, but there isn’t much to tell. 1993: I graduated, worked odd jobs, made money, bought a second-hand SLR with auto-wind. What was it really? I was curious about the machine. But that is how I started taking pictures. There were relatives around who also photographed, people I used to know fairly well, but because of family I had to stop being that close. As for my parents, they seemed to think I liked photographing anyway, because spending job money on a camera became a clue they used to judge me. Maybe so. Otherwise I wouldn’t still care this much about photography, even though you can barely find a trace of it in my life.
Maybe I was fated to take Cartier-Bresson as an idol, though I am a shallow admirer. I have seen his work, read some of his writing, know a little of his life. I seem to be following his road and not following it; in fact I have been drifting away from photography. I revere “the instant,” yet I often use AE (auto metering). I am good at waiting and still miss the moment. It is as if everything I do with a camera betrays Bresson’s “decisive moment.”
I believe there is no truth. If there is any, it is only partial truth, and that is not truth. This part of the thought was not inherited from anyone; it arrived by itself. Photography has a philosophical layer. That is hard to deny, because in many fragments photography observes relations among people and even draws conclusions. Photography also observes the non-human. Between these, the relation of human and non-human, of everything to the lens, easily touches off thoughts. Those thoughts, almost in concert, then affect the act of photographing (including the act of the person being photographed), and then go on changing behavior. The change is subtle and slow. Sometimes you don’t see it in one person, because a life is too short. But thought is inherited, the way I have been affected by certain photographers. The act of photographing keeps evolving — not only the technique. If photography is to take this subject up, it would probably take centuries to finish something so complex, and the dead, the very ill, the still living, the young, the old, the famous, the unknown would all have to come out and write, because each life is a unique experience. The effect photography has on each person, the point of entry, and what follows, are unique and still bound to one another.
Why talk about truth? Did you think, or did you once think, that photography captures truth? I don’t refute that. As I said, I believe there is partial truth. The truth we hold in mind is, for me, that kind of partial truth. But partial truth does not belong to truth. As I just said, each life is a unique experience. If today you draw close to the life of people in Penghu, you are still not a person of Penghu. Even if you are, the photographs you make are your image of Penghu, not every Penghu person’s image of Penghu. You will meet people who recognize your work, whose thoughts are close to yours, even as if by telepathy — and you and they will still have separate thoughts, however close they are. That is a defect of being human, and an advantage. We have no shared mind. Our minds are independent. An independent mind, plus the ability to tell “I” apart (before about two years old a child usually cannot tell the difference between I and other people): photography is for showing the partial truth in the mind. It will not be true truth.
Truth: what makes a photograph feel true is not how close it is to the thing in front of our eyes, nor how completely it renders shape, color, and tone — it is how far it brings out the truth in the mind. To put it sharply: if we have any condition for presenting what we take to be true, “bringing out the truth in the mind” matters much more than being able to render the scene perfectly. You could even say that a photograph which can bring out the truth in the mind already counts as a work by the person holding the camera. Then is a photographer someone able to bring out or express an inner thought or a feeling? Not necessarily. In many roles the photographer is a craftsman, not an artist. Besides presenting truth, most photographers can also “manufacture” the truth in the mind — what we might call professional sensitivity. I can’t quite bring myself to use the word “forgery,” but forgery is inevitable, and from more than one angle it needs no condemnation.
This part is a bit hard to tell. Take commercial photography. We see the thing to be photographed, then start inventing how to emphasize what we want to emphasize. What we want to emphasize is the truth in the mind — but we have to invent it on purpose, because the value and traits of the product are not decided by us. Salon pictures are the same: there must be beauty. You look at the person or the object, and invent how to make beauty appear. That invention is also on purpose. Salon and commercial photography have a forced aim. It is not what the thing wants to present. You already have a goal: beauty, and which kind of beauty; emphasis of a product’s traits; or a sense of its worth. None of that is a feeling the object offers of its own accord, and the image given to the object is also passive — not something it shows by itself. But this is still like bringing out the truth in the mind, as above. To photograph an orange, presenting the traits of an orange, or strengthening how tempting it is, matters more than being able to reproduce the original image. Besides, the human eye lies. When we look at an orange, the original image is not reproduced in the head. What we have is a result mixed with what we know of oranges, including smell and taste. Then the orange’s orange, in the mind, is a strengthened impression. A photograph that only reproduces the original image cannot handle that. The photographer’s “important function” is to present the orange after it has been strengthened in the mind.
Another part of the truth in the mind is very different. When an object, or some event, gives you a thought, that partial truth is already there in the mind. This truth is offered by the thing being photographed. It makes the truth in the mind appear directly. It leads you toward the way of photographing it. You present the reaction it left in you. It may be beautiful; it need not be. I don’t deny that a small part of commercial or salon photography also has this kind of truth in the mind — but that is only coincidence. For instance you also love the thing you photograph, and every day you invent a pile of ways to photograph it from every angle, and the traits of the product happen to sit inside what interests you: then you get “the truth in the mind” produced this way. Such coincidence should be even rarer in salon pictures.
From this angle you can almost smell how, in photography, the relation of subject and object is kept and moved. Besides the subject, it also includes the object showing a will of its own.