Average Photographs

On this trip to Taipei, from the 2nd to the 12th of April in 2004, my perceptual experiences, relational experiences, environmental experiences, and photographic experiences, all took on an averaging quality. Taiwanese culture is itself a set of averages. All throughout its history, the identification of what is considered “Taiwanese” hovered between plural forces imposed on inhabitants of the island. There was not a moment in the history of Taiwan that the island itself functioned autonomously. Its history has been one dominated by colonialism and political instability. Over the past three hundred years Taiwan has been occupied by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Han, the Manchurian, the British, the Japanese, the Chinese and the U.S. These schizophrenic forces has left its mark on the Taiwanese consciousness and there remains a lingering sadness arising from the vestiges of these episodic influences. Taiwanese culture is the summation of these differing spheres of influences, equating to sets of averages.

In photographs of my grandparents’ childhood, signs of Japanese culture are everywhere. One that has stayed acutely imprinted in my mind is a group portrait of my teenage Grandfather and relatives. I remember the yukatas worn by the men and the Japanese style school uniforms worn by the children. Their countenance and stance seemed stiff and firm, perhaps due to the prolonged exposure needed to make the picture. But what were singularly striking are the unusually large leaves of a fern sprouting behind the group. Its leaves were black and oily, each leaf seemingly three to four times larger than the heads of the adults. If it had tentacles, it would be not unlike a type of carnivorous plant. The fern leaves stood as the primary indicator of the tropical climate unique to Taiwan. The photograph contains an otherworldly quality that is directly due to those separate, unyielding elements: my grandfather and relatives in Japanese clothing, and the oversized fern leaves. Seeing this image is not a return to the history of which I came out of, it is a rediscovery in a search for something that had directly influenced me. This photograph is the aggregate of not only the tropicalized environment and the figures dressed in Japanese clothing, but also a combination of my imaginations and pre-knowledge, that is, knowledge derived from schooling and such. It is all of that. The picture serves as a fulcrum for my investigation on the trajectory of how I arrived at where I am now.

On April 9th, 2004, I was in and around the place that I spent my first eleven years. On that day I have lived in the United States for exactly 20 years and 57 days. It was in that one week that I felt a transformation in the way that I observed, in the way that I looked. I was looking at things around me, the streets, the objects, the buildings around the area that I grew up with, and while I looked, they were looking back. I was looking with a set of experiences that began to go towards the Western 20 years ago at these objects and sites that contained their own internal histories. Our gazes clashed, it stopped somewhere in the middle. If I were to trace imaginary lines of the direction of my gazes and the lines in which the things looked back, there would be points, in and around the middle of these imaginary lines. For some of these gaze-meetings, I decided to record them in the form of photographs. These points, which became simultaneously temporal and spatial, are points of average. Therefore, the records in the form of photographs are average photographs. The average photograph is defined as the photographic depiction that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values. The equation for the average photograph can be:

(photographer / subject) x (camera) = average photograph

The photographs are the results of a type of collaboration, a joint effort by myself who operated the 4 x 5 inch field camera set up on a tripod, and the various objects and sites who presented themselves to me in the way that they chose to. The camera, then, was the only method possible of mediating this encounter, further to record it in a form that is containable.

On that day, I took a walk on the route that I, as a child, took daily from my home to my elementary school. I stress here again that this is not a return or revisit to the various sites that route go through. It was a rediscovery of it because not only have I changed; the places have also gone through apparent transformations over the years, needless to say. That sensation that one feels immediately when seeing a place that was once familiar but no longer due to the mechanisms of temporality is akin to being confronted to confess secrets that one has consciously chosen to withhold in the recesses of memory. While I took this walk for the first time since childhood, it was as if the streets itself, the buildings, the piles of trash, strange cats, people, etc., demanded from me a complete disclosure of these secrets, to which I did not know where I would begin. My immediate reaction to the impasse was to take pictures, put these objects and sites in a form that I presumed to be able to understand. It came out of an urge to historicize, from a lack of other means, so that the circumstances can be reduced and simplified in digest forms. This was clearly the wrong choice, or the wrong method, since understanding in this way does not equate mutual understanding, when there is a direct and acknowledged exchange. Therefore these images are dead. They were stopped in that middle point, the zero between the plus and minus.