Strike F11 for whole page view or for normal window Strike F11 for whole page view or for normal window Introduction
This project will be a photo book, in which landscapes and still lifes are juxtaposed with texts. These texts record average people's bagatelles and memories that are attached to the photographed places or objects located around New York City.
As the artist, Zheng Yaohua, has stated, this work was inspired by the book On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam by Joel Sternfeld, and imitates its form (even its title). Unlike the ones Sternfeld dealt with, Zheng's "stories" have no chance of becoming a part of history. However, this fact also serves as one of the motivations for this project. Zheng admits that although he has not been making an album about immigrants, his immigration background has had an effect on his subject building and the clues he chose to focus on.
Most photographs in this project were taken on 4" x 5" negative films.
The project began in 2007 and is now approaching its goal of 25 sets (a set consists of a piece of memoir and a photograph of the related site). Some sets have been selected for photography exhibitions, including Intimate Distance (Qart Gallery, New York, 2007) and 4 Photo Show (456 Gallery, New York, 2008).
Artist Statement
I believe that some seemingly inconsequential personal memories stir people more frequently than significant historical events do. I also believe that most people's lives appear completely uneventful to others. At the end of 2006, after reading for the second time Joel Sternfeld's On This Site, a book juxtaposing landscape photographs with texts about a series of tragic events in American collective memory, I decided to make a book for another type of memories. I started photographing the sites where people's private memories were attached, recording memories that might be meaningful only to their owners.
Although "image-text" has not been a fantastic new idea, it naturally becomes a tool for a project that borrows a form of communication from tourism, — on the Lion's Mound, looking down at the lush plain, the battlefield Waterloo, where the topography has changed long ago, the guide counts the 47,000 dead or wounded and then the tourists sigh. The form helps to construct the project and to query the difference of reliability and significance to treat depictions of collective/public memory and individual/private memory as both of them are recorded in detail.
The ongoing project has also given me a chance to revisit this experience. One unconsciously seeks an awareness of being anchored. By attaching memories to places or objects where he/she settles or tarries, one builds the relationship of mutual recognition and confirmation with the world. An intersection, a mailbox or a tiny thorn therefore becomes his/her vessel of private memory or monument of personal history. I was amazed by some details while recording for this growing collection and was finally convinced that they had been or would be the irrefutable evidence of one's life in his/her memory.
To simulate the look of uneventful lives, I waited for sunny days to photograph on the sites where various intimate memories were interspersed, hoping to avoid painting the images with the likely mawkish photographic expressions of a know-it-all. 4"x5" film, as deep depth of field as possible, wide framing, nonhierarchical composition, by which I offered audience a chance to retrace the artist's searching and, thereby, his imagination. When brightening the upper midtones, lowering its contrast, the highly detailed realistic sun drenched images were washed down, which offered me a world of memory, of lucid dreams. However, I cannot tell to whom the dreams belong.
September 12, 2010
Artist Notes
¶ "Are those real stories or fictions?"
I'd like to ask back instead of answering, "Would you ask Sternfeld the same question about his On This Site?"
This reciprocal questioning has been a component of this project.
¶ Sternfeld's book revealed a certain way of reading photos. Viewers not only project emotions onto a photo that they're viewing, they also project specific objects onto it when they believe or guess that a missing element may have visually existed in the scene.
¶ This is one of the ways that humans view the world and some photographs have worked this way. Photograph what was seen while focus on what had visually disappeared.
¶ I don't think the strategy of entrusting viewers with the task of drawing a final image only applies to literature exclusively. Photography shares this strategy. Sternfeld's works did, and I'm following his footsteps in this project.
¶ Dates! It seems like a sin in Western Culture if you forget certain dates, birthdays, first dates, wedding anniversaries. People fully dress events up with historic attire to make them important. The time stamps are the bow ties.
I'd like to clarify that in this project, most of the dates came from my research on the internet, not from exact memories of the protagonists. However, I have always had doubts about the necessity of my perfectionism.
¶ I love Ci, Sanqu, haiku and narrative songs accompanied on a guitar. I like Ernest Hemingway, but not because of his taciturn heroes; I also like Heinrich Böll and his nagging group portraits. I like William Eggleston and Jeff Wall not because of the color of the former and the flying papers or talking dead soldiers of the latter.
¶ I am fascinated by those simple, clear and direct ways of expression as well as their results. I love to see that things keep their basic appearances. Nothing is protruded and nothing is carelessly blurred as background. Yes, something like scenes and lives in the early afternoon sun.
¶ A large format camera helps to make simple and clear images. That is why I shifted to a wooden 4" x 5". On a well tilted ground glass I see mysteries and undercurrents.
¶ Photograph corresponding figures? Every now and then, I think it is the trend. But I have been worrying about ringers for ones that photography has already created.
However, the corresponding figures might have been there and nourished by viewers with their imagination.
October, 4-25, 2009