Frequently, my questions to myself always come when I am peeping through the hole of the viewfinder: "What meanings do I create by pushing the button now?" "Should I push it now or wait or pan my camera for a different angle?" "What stories do I want to tell?" "In what ways are the pictures coming out connected with my feelings?" In the process in which I want my pictures to tell a story I see in the world, pushing or not pushing the button resembles the old "to be or not to be . . ."
This world has its many orders. Showing such orders by showing people pictures is not an easy thing. Exposures then both literally mean the process when light reaches the film and a way of making clear the general and abstract rules of the orders by showing such rules visually. I have, in recent two years, stopped fancying big head shots with wonderful bokeh, or concentrating on the visual structure of each single shot. Instead, individual shots must be considered, quite often before the pictures are taken, through a structure/frame through which I desire to show the stories/orders/rules I see in the world with my attitudes in it.
What do such an order look like? This is a question that I need to constantly ask myself. Also, each time I think about this question, it pushes me to think the order's visual representation: In what ways does the social order become concretized, particularized, and thingfied into either an object or a slice of social relations?
Before I submerge into this theoretical sink, it might be interesting to talk about my only photo class. When I was at BG, the photo instructor assigned us photo sessions with themes such as "time," "strength" "memory," . . . Interestingly, at that time, I was reading Foucault and de Certeau and I was asking myself: Ha! This is interesting! How do we shoot a theme of "Practices of Everyday Life," "Knowledge and Power," "The Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish"? Interestingly, I found that when these questions are framed within a visual context, they become so different and they almost push an ethnographic field research attitude/incentive so that I begin to think about the material/social manifestations of otherwise more abstract and more theoretical orders. Later on (several years later), I grew with more knowledge in materialist theorization, finding empirical data and evidences start to mean more to me. Of course, for a summer course of photography, I did not venture much more than finishing the mere minimum of the photo assignments and did not explore, except for mentally, the wonders of realizing visually "Discipline and Punish." However, those thoughts have provoked me to see connections between photography and academic writings as connected in many ways. Frequently, my understandings of one inform the other, by raising new questions, finding new paths for realizing, and seeing new possibilities for new projects.
Currently, a storm is brewing now that I am going back to China and to visit Chinese villages, I plan to do a photo project on urban and rural spaces, urban and rural practices of everyday life (at last). Since an estimated population of 225.42 million peasants have been working in places other than their hometowns at the end of 2008 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2008), it is really important to see how the rural spaces have changed and how the rural population has impacted Chinese urbanization processes. Important questions, but also very big and vague. The same kind of brain exercises needs to be done to link these questions into their visual formations of social relations. There are many interesting and potentially heartbreaking pictures that I have been informed. For instance, my parents told me that in our village, one village member had had a well dug and he had been making money by selling water for irrigation. Before, the village commune pays him a reduced annual price and he makes sure all village people have water to drink by filling the water tower once or twice a week. Later on, because of the price issue, this guy, the one who drew the well, decided not to supply any water unless it is from individual payment of individual household, with a raised price. Since household containers are all too small, each household has to dig deep into their own yard to make a household reservoir so that it is worth the while to pay and get the water from a long way. Thus, the underground water pipe system of the village is nullified and now, each household will make its appointment with the well owner to get water. And they pay more than 2,000 yuan to have their individual reservoir constructed and another 100 yuan for the pump. Since my parents only occasionally live in the village, they asked our neighbor so that we can share their reservoir with them. How do they do that? Easy: They have a hole in the wall so that the pump of my neighbor can pump the water into our house. A wall of separation and a pipe of connection through the wall will be a telling picture of such a war on water. This is just one of the many that I am going to do. But you have got the idea, when I have a whole story to tell, then, each picture becomes a visual element connected to the textures of the whole story. Photography, then, manifests to me its strong sense of being used as a genre of "exposing" social relations, inequity, injustice, and power differences at large. I do not think this is too long from the moment that I decide that I will, eventually, do a visual project of "Discipline and Punish" -- You never know!!!
For deconstruction and reconstruction to go on, hand in hand, like lovers, in the first morning walk after days of departure, I must shoot.
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