FOTOGRAFICA: FOTOGRAAF HU YANG : FOTOGRAFIE ALS MEDIUM VOOR ONDERZOEK, INZICHT, VISIE, REFLECTIE EN COMMUNICATIE

In zijn project "SHANGHAI LIVING" gebruikt de Chinese fotograaf HU YANG het medium fotografie waarvoor het eigenlijk dient en waardoor het ook maatschappelijk een zin krijgt, nl. als "document humain" met een visie die aanzet tot reflectie en communicatie. Hoewel elke foto op zich betekenisvol is, moeten alle foto's van dit project als één samenhangend geheel worden gezien en beoordeeld. Voor elke foto heeft de fotograaf ook een korte maar zeer relevante "commentaar" van de gefotografeerde betrokken personages voorzien waarin zij hun eigen in beeld gebrachte situatie persoonlijk toelichten. Deze combinatie van beeld (als standpunt van de fotograaf) en woord (als standpunt van de gefotografeerde) is bijzonder innovatief in de toepassing van het medium fotografie en creëert bovendien een meerwaarde waarbij de kijker als participerende "derde" wordt uitgenodigd om communicatief rationeel mee te gaan in het verhaal, zich een eigen oordeel te vormen in dialoog met de standpunten van de fotograaf en de gefotografeerden, m.a.w. gericht, gestructureerd en productief na te denken, in tegenstelling tot het vrijblijvend en stuurloos individualistisch fantaseren waartoe de ongestructureerde, onproductieve of zelfs contraproductieve chaos van de "artistieke" fotografie meestal aanleiding geeft.

Het doel en het nut van de fotografie bestaat erin om de mist die ons (in)zicht belemmert en de afstand en onze relatie tot andere individuen en de gemeenschap vertroebelt, op te lossen en ons blikveld helderder en wijder te maken, niet om die mist artistieksgewijs nog dikker, ondoorzichtiger te maken en ons oriëntatieveld te vernauwen .

Via de volgende links ( in 3 delen) kunnen alle foto's (met commentaren van de gefotografeerden) van het project "SHANGHAI LIVING" bekeken en gelezen worden (enkel via registratie op deze site indien men alle foto's wil zien).

1.http://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/archives/detail/code/HY_SH14

2.http://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/archives/detail/code/HY_SH83

3.http://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/archives/detail/code/HY_SH120

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DIVERSE VISIES OP HET PROJECT "SHANGHAI LIVING"

Interpreting Hu Yang's Shanghai Living in Camera Language

by Lin Lu (Professor of Shanghai Normal University) 2000

Hu Yang's 'Shanghai Living' came to a phasic full stop after 14 months' hard efforts. Pictures of 500 families compose a visual space that wins commentaries and attention from all levels of the society. From either the sociological of the cultural prespective, people can have their own interpretations to this unique series of work. And in this commentary, I'm interpreting Hu Yang's work by painstaking efforts only in camera language, trying to figure out what kind of cisual stories he wants to tell us.

In the preface of the exhibition, I once said there are at least two interpretations for his work. Shanghai families and Shanghai families in Hu Yang's eyes. First, these pictures do constitute an authentic portrait of the Shanghai families in the 21st century from the most luxury to the shabby dwelling; the satisfied to the anguished expressions all strike a pose in this image world. Going through the pictures, I feel all kind of feelings welling up in my heart. Just as Hu Yang puts it, historically speaking these pictures compose an image documentary of Shanghai families. They open a door through which we can enter the living rooms, cut through the studies, go into the bedrooms and face the spaces where Shanghai people lead their diverse lives and build their unique characters. Each family is an isolated world where an either heartrending or soul-stirring story takes place. Reading there pictures silently, you can have your own interpretations for Shanghai families. Shanghai has always been a city absorbing all from nature, and these pictures may help you more about its cosmopolitanism.

Second, these are pictures in a photographer's eyes, which, without fail, will carry his personal elucidation. American sociologist Susan Sontag once said that in this society, a photographer's practice is an external inroad; and a photographer could only be an observer. On stepping into each family, Hu Yang has already started his evaluation with his eyes. Therefore, we can read through the pictures a photographer’s concern for the life in Shanghai. Hu Yang believes his work is a description and interpretation of Shanghai families from a sociological perspective. With a Contax 645N camera and color negative film, he pressed his shutter and got images between reality and imagination. Although he understands quite well that these instantaneous pictures can’t bear too much moral or ethical connotations, they are still a great achievement, especially when the dazzling details in the pictures are presented with the people inside.

But what’s the significance of Hu Yang’s works to Shanghai families? And what’s the difference between his camera language and other photographers?

Take Jiang Jian (famous photographer of He’nan) for example. His work changes from black and white to multicolor and tells the lives of people living in He’nan’s villages. He adopted similar color ad light to the ones Hu Yang used in his ‘Shanghai Living’, and instead of presenting a cosmopolitan city, reflected an authentic local environment. However, their crucial difference is that Kiang Jian chose planar pictures in which people (or a person) directly and indifferently stared at the camera, hiding their inner emotions behind the colors. The audience has been alienated from the people in the pictures, which are coated with super realism; while Hu Yang adopted three-dimensional pictures which have wider visual angles and are more intimate with the audience. This might be what Hu Yang seeks after and his peaceful interpretation of Shanghai families, which leaves the audience a faint but hovering impression.
On the 4th Pingyao International Photograph Exhibition, Hu Yang’s work happened to be displayed in the same hall with Netherlands photographer Robert Van-der Hilst’s ‘Cuba Families’, which, with precise colors and an audacious but firm style, combined perfectly Cuban people’s daily life with their spiritual power and immediately caught the eyes of the audience. However, Hu Yang pursues different things. Instead of reversal film or digital camera, he used color negative film, which is very sensitive to color temperature, to reflect authentic life in Shanghai. There for, the colors in his pictures are not precisely ‘accurate’, some even ‘deviate’ from the original ones. However, these deviations represent not only the charm of natural scenes but the photographer’s feelings as well. The subtle transition between colors and feelings are his exact language to the multiplicity and complexity of life. If you think the camera interpretations are not crucial enough, we might as well make conjectures about the photographer’s inner world. First we should accept that a theme like ‘Shanghai Living’ is a grand narrative project that needs more that just several pictures. Only a huge amount of pictures can cause heartquake and tell the audience what the world looks like. In such a process, the photographer must have been under great pressure and made painstaking efforts to produce 500 works of the same style. Although a complete series, these 500 pictures reflect visual changes which could be recognized not only in the pictures but in the photographer’s inner world. Any imprudence could have led the work into a paradox pointed out by Susan Sontag more that 30 years ago.

In order not to tell all the families in the same language, Hu Yang tried his best for ‘breakout’ and new perspectives. He talked with the families while taking their pictures, trying to catch special moments. Sometimes he pressed the shutter abruptly; sometimes he patiently led the people calming down and into their deep hearts. Through the pictures, he wants to tell the most brilliant stories of these Shanghai families, either it’s a decoration details, a scattered shade and shadow, an eye expression, or a posture.

And then we see people in the pictures present themselves naturally and without any affectation. We see affecting dignity, simple happiness, longings for high quality life and apparent loneliness, all telling vivid stories happenend in Shanghai families. Little by little, you will enter these families and find that the lives there are not dramas directed by the photographer with the people in the pictures. You will have enough reason to talk thoroughly with them, or, to be exact, with your inner self.
Of course it’s hard to avoid repetitions among the pcitures, which put the camera to a frazzle in tis narration. Luckily the photographer keeps his efforts in practicing and just as what is said at the beginning, this is a full stop for just a phase. More new ¡®chapters’are drastically incubating in the photogrpaher’s mind. The other day in the autumn sunshine, Hu Yang confidently told me that with the camera he will go deeper into Shanghai famlies and finish a new round visual conversation with them. I believe we have enough reasons to expect.
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Image Utopia

by Zhang Hong (Professor of Tongji University) 2004

Compared with modern high-rises and busy commercial and amusement buildings, places where Shanghai people live tell more about their daily life. Exterior grandness and prosperity please visitors’ eyes while coziness and warmth are what Shanghai people really need. Homes are very private places for Shanghainese: they seldom invite people to visit them at home; and they always make home a tidy and cozy place, sometimes even resplendent and magnificent, though very often it may look shabby outside. Homes are interior secret spaces where Shanghainese lead their lives and Shanghai builds its characters.

In fact, no city in China could be more concerned about and more sensitive to the concept of private space than Shanghai is. Shanghai people regard home as an ego-world that is always on the alert. It helps foster their prissiness and preciseness, which will consequently turn the city into a mature living community and modern metropolis. On the other hand, Shanghai people are well classified by their social status. Class consciousness has been deeply rooted in their minds since China was reduced to a semi-colonial society, and housing conditions, districts and environment are the three most telling symbols of a ‘social identity’. Although great efforts have been made since 1949 to eliminate the class differences, class consciousness has taken root among Shanghai people and become their inveterate unconsciousness. Diverse life styles are signs of their social status and indicate different social identities.

Therefore, Shanghai is rather an ‘interior’ city. Only by plunging deep into the interiority - Shanghai people’s homes – can we truly know this city’s spiritual life, while photography art helps achieve this. Most photographers take pictures of public cultural signs such as skyscrapers in Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, the architecture complex on the Bund, Shikumen houses at Xintiandi and other stylish modern visual images that show not the interior authentic life of Shanghainese but the exterior flashy and superficial cosmopolitism of Shanghai.

With a view to disclose Shanghai people’s authentic daily lives, Hu Yang’s Shanghai Living distinguishes itself from other photograph works. For several years, he has devoted himself to visiting different Shanghai families and taking pictures of their daily lives, through which we can see a multifarious and ever-changing Shanghai.

Hu Yang’s panoramic image series consisting of different ‘Shanghai families’ may not be mentioned in the same breath with Balzac’s La Comdie Humaine, it deserves the name of a present image documentary of Shanghai. In Hu Yang’s eyes, ‘families’ are cells that constitute this modern city and units into which we dissect this society. Just like commodities constructed the capitalist society, families compose a modern city life. Hu Yang is just like a ‘city physiologist’ who took physiological sections of this city’s histological structure by which we can get into the inner world of this society. His work is a precise sample of Shanghai people’s daily life. A city is first where people live, then where people carry on different activities. So-called ‘poetic dwelling’ is just feeding on illusions.

However, Hu Yang is not just a recorder of Shanghai people’s daily life. All through the years, many photographers either intentionally or unintentionally have taken pictures of diverse families in Shanghai for newspapers or reports, whose significance fades away with the time.

Hu Yang is one of the few photographers who have unique image language and photography concepts. His pictures are contradictions: stillness reveals a drastically changing vanity fair; silence tells the hurly burly and restlessness of the exterior world; and spatial extensity reflects the history. His pictures can help us break away from the actual rip-roaring society and calm down into quiet inner world for auto criticism. Pictures declare internal conflicts of verbal and visual images. With these pictures, Hu Yang critically calls in question the present world, which cannot be achieved by cursory shade and shadow technology.

Only by regarding Hu Yang’s pictures as a whole can we comprehend what they actually imply. Diverse Shanghai families are not direct records of the exterior world, people with different social status, age and feature, race, nationality and gender live in Hu’s camera world. Either capacious or narrow, either luxurious or simple, either magnificent or cozy, these families compose the multiplicity of Shanghai’s city life. Various families display diverse innate characters and essential aspects that help to compose this distinctive society. Hu focused on the interactive relation between ‘people’ and ‘families’ of this metropolis. Through Hu’s camera, people relate their living conditions and testify the life style of an age.

Therefore, Hu Yang has a special power in connecting isolated families into serial images that are seeming talking to each other. All these families once confronted the same camera and answered the same questions, and their pictures were developed in the same darkroom. No matter which family they come from, they are now presented in pictures of the same size. In Hu Yang’s image world, people from different social classes are equally treated and valued. With his photography art, Hu Yang reconstructed Shanghai’s social relations.

This might be Hu Yang’s subconscious photography ideal: to create an ‘Image Utopia’ of Shanghai. People with different social identities become citizens of his Utopian world where they can enjoy equal rights. With these symbolistic images, Hu Yang reveals his art ideal of equality and realism.

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