Near failures

We were walking down a random street in the small town of Puxin. The sun was out, and I spent a minute or so taking photos of the light playing across the faded old screens above one of the storefronts lining the street. “What the hell are you doing?” a man’s voice called from behind me. I turned to find that three rather menacing figures had emerged from the door.  “I’m just admiring the light on those old screens,” I said. They looked up, squinting. “They don’t make screens like that any more.”  “That’s true,” the center one said, a cigarette dangling from his hand. “We thought you might be an investigator or something.” I swallowed a laugh, which might be taken the wrong way. Not being ethnically Asian, it would be highly unlikely that I would be working with any authorities in such a capacity. But I didn’t say that, and the looks on their faces implied that they, too, were coming to the conclusion that I most likely an innocent tourist. “Can I take your picture?” I said, raising my camera briefly, but the man in the middle just chuckled.  “I’m not the kind of person who is always getting his photo taken,” he said.

Unlike China, Taiwan has gradually been moving towards living with Covid, as more people have gotten vaccines. Mask mandates are still in place, but the vigorous and ubiquitous testing stations around hospitals have largely been abandoned. I was passing by one such abandoned testing station near the entrance to the emergency room at a local hospital, its rubber gloves having dissolved and disintegrated into uselessness, when a taxi pulled up behind me. “Help!” the occupants cried, gesturing at the elderly person still in the taxi. “He is having trouble breathing!” The staff rushed out with a wheelchair and they wheeled the patient in. I took the above shot of the scene reflected in the glass of the abandoned testing station, not daring to get any closer. But it occurred to me that, even though opening up may be the best path forward, it is not without its victims. 

I was also glad that my new camera has a relatively silent shutter, so that I wouldn’t intrude on the moment before leaving them to get on with their (hopefully best) lives.

So we called another ride. As we waited, I spotted a mother and son waiting by the entrance to a museum/performance space nearby, and their interaction took me back to when I was that age, confused and frustrated as I confused and frustrated my own parents. The mother’s disapproval bordering on astonishment was palpable, as was the boy’s sense of being utterly lost. What had he done, or failed to do? What vision of his parents had he failed to realize? It didn’t matter, I knew. The damage was done.

I was a teenager when I took this photo. I had just arrived at college, and, not feeling comfortable with most of the student population, took refuge in the campus’s International House, an old, rickety place far from the ritzy whitebread fraternities full of loudly drunk young men wearing khakis and baseball caps.  Taka, the man standing in the doorway to his little room, was an exchange student from Osaka, Japan, and like me, he had also taken refuge at the iHop, as we called it. The woman, another Japanese exchange student, was getting ready to attend some university event with the man on the right. Taka and I were listening to Japanese music when the couple came to say they were leaving. For some reason the two Japanese students could not managed to make eye contact, as the white student looked on, somewhat puzzled. Taka seemed disappointed yet resigned, and I snapped a single shot before they left and we continued listening to our music.

Linda had just parked on the side of Nanjing East Road in Taipei when we heard a loud SMACK behind us. As Chenbl and I got out of the car, I spotted a group of foreigners moving hastily away. Behind us, a scooter driver was struggling up from the pavement where he’d been thrown, as the cabbie, who had apparently hit him while making a mad dash across the lanes to pick up a fare, was getting out of his taxi. Already the shouting and accusation were being thrown about. The red light of an ad across the street made it seem as if blood were spilling out of the fallen scooter. “Come on!” Chenbl whispered urgently, having told Linda to drive away immediately. “We need to get out of here before they notice us and drag us into it!” The cabbie and the scooter rider were getting into it, gesturing wildly and shouting. Just as a bus pulled out from the adjacent street with an ad featuring cartoon animals delivering a celebratory cake to the warring couple, I took a single shot and hastened after Chenbl.

We were on a bus in Sevilla, Spain. We’d just gotten into town, and had decided to go take a look around and find something to eat.  Not long after we’d gotten on a bus, it stopped suddenly in the middle of traffic. The driver bolted out the door and hailed a passing police car. We all just sat, looking at each other in confusion, as the police came over and took a fellow off the bus and started interrogating him. While we were sitting and waiting, wondering what was going on and if it happened a lot, an older woman in blue sat fuming in a seat across from me. As the minutes passed, rage and indignation emanated from her in waves; she dared us all to say something, and finding no one to meet her gaze, glared into space. 

It seems as if the only time indigenous Taiwanese people appear in the media, they are dancing. Or singing. Or dancing and singing. Granted, we’ve come a long way from the genocidal policies of the Japanese or the condescending disregard of the KMT, but the phenomenon still exists. The reasons behind it are complex, and I am not an anthropologist. I was wandering through the rehearsals for the inauguration ceremony for our latest president, Tsai Ying-wen, who would go on to issue an official apology on behalf of the government to Taiwan’s native population for centuries of oppression, a historical first and a good sign. In photographing the event, I approached the indigenous performers with the aim of at least avoiding the usual composition of lines of laughing, happy tribal members doing the Usual Tribal Things. I’m not sure I succeeded; the reason this scene caught my eye lays largely in my own imagination, and may have nothing to do with reality. But perhaps, just perhaps, this young man is eyeing his regalia with the hope that, in the future, we will see more of him and his people than just a song and dance.

I often tell my photography students that intent is one of the most important things in making a photograph. When I was confronted with this scene on the train during my last visit to the U.S. state of Oklahoma, I paused before taking the shot. What was my intent here? At first glance, one might wonder if I was attracted simply by the image of a very large person, in a HAHA OH AMERICAN FAT PEOPLE sort of way, but that’s not in fact what struck me. She’s travelling, for one thing. Maybe she can’t take plane travel? She’s on oxygen, she’s got a box of who knows what kinds of medicines, and she needs a walker. But no matter her condition or what caused it, she’s also out there, not just struggling, but going places. And if that isn’t enough, all of her travel gear is color coordinated. She may not be in the best of health, but she’s got style. I don’t know where she was going or why, but in my heart I hoped she was on an adventure.

I still wonder, though.

I was heading out of Tokyo after a gig, and of course we had to go through airport security procedures. No cameras. No phones. No camera phones. No photos, period. Every corner of the area was being constantly scrutinized by airport cameras, but that was ok. 

He led me down a flight of impossibly narrow stairs to what was left of the basement of the house, where there was a bed and, sure enough, a drum set. It was old, not a known brand, and had obviously been well used. "I'll let it go for cheap," he said as his son clambered down behind us and began beating the drums. Was he tired of the noise? But someone had purchased the drums for a reason, as well as the extensive rhythm exercise books on the stand. I looked over at the wall behind the bed, the only thing keeping the roadwork from spilling into the room. I then took a shot of the boy playing the drums. "I'll ask around," I told him. Later, when I showed him the shot on my ipad, I became the center of attention for the whole family. But when I offered to email it to him, he declined.  "We don't use computers," he said, grinning, embarrassed, looking down at his boy, who was staring at the image on the screen. 

I was up in the Tokyo Skytree. I like going up in such places in large cities to get a view of everything from above. But photos taken from them are rarely of any interest. So instead I look at the scenes within for photos of the temporary denizens of our lofty height.  There were people posing for pictures, people taking pictures, people looking at pictures, people on their phones, all as the sun set and the lights below spread across the landscape of the city.  The selfie stick is, of course, a sign of our times, and I like this scene of three groups of people engaging with their devices in different ways.

The father on the path is lifting his son up first as they head for the small set of stairs to the greener pastures of the cliff, away from the ledge, though it bears the signs of waterfalls spilling through it in the past. The pregnant mother follows, her hand out to support her husband and son. The grandmother follows, stepping gingerly in a sideways fashion, followed last by the eldest daughter, who hand she reaches for. They tread on many layers of ancient stone, and while below them is a locked dungeon door bearing the very colors of their clothes, above them is the sky. 

In the last photo I mentioned breakfast at a local hole-in-the-wall shop located solidly outside the normal tourist boundaries of the water town I'd been visiting. Inside, as I ate my rather featureless noodles, the next table was surrounded by a group of local men watching a chess game. They were all laborers and farmers, and Chinese men in the countryside often wear grimy old suits. One of them held a lit cigarette in his hands, which bore evidence of years of manual labor, behind his back as flies buzzed here and there. His shiny grey suit stood out a bit from the browns and blues of his neighbors. I had just paid my bill and took a few shots before I left. Nobody paid me any attention; their focus was on the game.

I was in the old water town of Zhouzhuang, and had just managed to escape the tourist part of the area, slipping past the gates to the ordinary Chinese neighborhood beyond, where regular people lived, worked and ate. I had breakfast in a dusty shop with no adornment, slurping hot noodles and talking with some of the older men who frequented the place.  Afterwards I walked further afield, towards the shipping canal. On the bank a man was feeding ducks. At first I thought: Oh, cute ducks, but after asking the man some questions and observing his movements, it seemed that he was a mute, unable to make anything other than unintelligible sounds. He was also physically disabled, forced into a permanent squat due to atrophied legs.  He seemed to have a real affinity for the ducks, however. They obeyed his every command, though we couldn't make out what he was saying, and the ducks proceeded docilely up and down the feeding plank at his direction. He saw me taking photos and called some ducklings out of the shelter for me to photograph. He apparently lived more or less on the boat, and I wondered what his standing was in the village, how he'd come to where he was, and what he would have done without his ducks.