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Elaine Smith, volunteer Lisa Lee, foreign guests coordinator Amy Liu,
and Julia Durkin at PIP Pingyao September 2013 |
Following on from the first Auckland Festival of Photography's exhibition last
year and my two-person show with Julian Ward, which followed PhotoForum's six
Auckland photographers show in 2011, the profile of New Zealand photographers
is gradually being lifted in mainland China.
Credit goes to Julia Durkin for hosting PIP artistic director,
Zhang Guotian during the Auckland Festival of Photography in June, as part of
the effort to coordinate and exchange work from the growing number of
photography festivals worldwide. Zhang said he enjoyed his visit and the welcome
given him in recognition of Pingyao's aims and achievements. He saw a wide
range of New Zealand work at the Festival and visited local archives to study historical
collections and curatorial practices.
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| Zhang Guotian, Artistic Director of PIP, 2013 |
Durkin's right hand woman at the AFP, Elaine Smith, selected work by
four Aucklanders to show at PIP this year: Chris Corson-Scott (5 images),
Geoffrey Heath (5), Anita Jacobsen (4), and Vicky Thomas (5). It was a modest beginning
for presenting the work of people who have
earned this exposure, when compared to the more ambitious solo presentations of
PIP old hands, like Don Penny (USA) and Bronek Kozka (Australia), just a dozen
metres away. It is a pity that they were unable to attend in person to experience
the cacophony if images of all subjects, sizes, and levels of competence that surrounded
their work in the old cotton mill and most other spaces.
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| Geoffrey Heath's work at PIP 2013 |
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| Vicky Thomas's work at PIP 2013 |
For me, Heath,
Jacobsen and Thomas's work was very competent but they are still in the process
of finding their full voice. Unlike them, Corson-Scott avoided the art schools,
with their growing conservatism, and struck out on his own. Consequently, he
seemed to pop out of nowhere with a mature vision, when I first saw his work in
the show at Northart that he curated with Edward Hanfling for this year's AFP,
and their meticulous preparation for that show convinced PhotoForum and Rim
Books to publish their Pictures They Want to Make: Recent
Auckland Photography. PhotoForum,
Auckland, 2013).
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| Geoffrey Heath (left) and Chris Corson-Scott's work at PIP Pingyao, 2013 . Photo courtesy Julia Durkin |
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| Chris Corson-Scott's work at PIP Pingyao. Photo courtesy Julia Durkin |
Corson-Scott's contemplative, intensely rendered images belie the
fact that he is still at an early stage in his development. His thinking is remarkably
advanced and more ambitious than most of his peers, partly, I think, because he
shares with his late father, the painter Ian Scott, a high level of
intellectual enquiry about the nature of form and content in relation to the
vernacular. The lighting is always dicey at PIP but if anything,
Corson-Scott's prints could have been bigger to dominate the large panels they
were on, as they did in Auckland.
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| Pingyao International Photography Festival 2013 compendium spread for Auckland Festival of Photography's exhibition. Photograph by Anita Jacobsen |
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| Pingyao International Photography Festival 2013 compendium spread for Auckland Festival of Photography's exhibition. Photographs by Chris Corson-Scott and Geoffrey Heath |
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| Pingyao International Photography Festival 2013 compendium spread for Auckland Festival of Photography's exhibition. Photographs by Vicky Thomas |
Not knowing until the last moment where one's work will be shown
is a common PIP risk, but it is remarkable how many of the thousands of viewers
can tune out the environmental static to take a look at the work itself, no
matter how unsympathetic the lighting is. And it reminds me of the NZ National Art
Gallery's reliance on daylight to illuminate its collection only 40 years ago.
For future PIP exhibitions, I hope both the AFP, PhotoForum, and
any other contributions will also present significant work from south of the
Bombay hills, to better represent photography in New Zealand. That also would
be in the spirit of PIP.
Listed on page 411 of the heavy, well-illustrated 432-page PIP
compendium (for it is virtually impossible to catalogue or completely note
everything on show) is a bio for curator Vivien Shao Wehhao from Wellington.
She apparently organised a display of work by Zhang Qian that was
listed as 'Straggling & Belonging' in the essential China Pingyao
13th PIP Guide Book. "Struggling", rather than straggling, might
have been the word lost in translation. Like dozens of other shows, I think I
missed it on my rounds, and in my last minute rush to grab reference pictures
of interesting shows with outstanding,
typical, or terrible work, to study later.
On the bullet train from Beijing to Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi
Province with about as many people as the whole of New Zealand, I received a
text to say that Zoe Zhang, from Auckland, was coming to Pingyao. She had
visited me in Beijing a few months earlier, and decided to re-present her
self-representations from an exhibition of Chinese New Zealanders held at the
Wallace Arts Centre in Auckland a year or so ago. She was a little apologetic
because a flood in the Old Cotton Mill had spoiled her chance to present the
work in two sets, facing each other. That might have worked fine, but for me
the alternating large bold prints of herself and special objects worked fine
and the connections were still made, without compromising the main idea based
on her holding imaginary objects in her hands and leaving the audience to
wonder what she was thinking of.
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| Zoe Zhang with her exhibition in the Old Cotton Mill, PIP 2013 |
Zoe was a student of some of my past students, like Marcus
Williams, and old friends like Allan
McDonald and John Malcolm at Unitec, Auckland. She also studied with my friend
KT Ho, at the Auckland University of Technology, so there was a connection
there. But what I did not realise at first, was that she is an inspiring
networker and an outstanding translator, who time and again introduced me to
top photographers and educators and translated for me. Consequently, when the PIP
meeting for curators was postponed and left 20 people in the lurch, she and I
were able to take control and get a round-table discussion going. With her
help, I was also able to providing a practical demonstration of editing one's
pictures for a show, using the work a Shanghai curator had brought to the
session.
To my delight, I discovered that Zoe's exhibiting neighbour was Fan
Shunzan, whom I met in 2011 when he was giving away copies of his
home-printed-and-packaged postcards to rich foreigners like me. I had insisted on
buying a few sets, which surprised him, because I wanted to share them with friends,
and use the example of his impressive imagery
and enterprise to inspire my last batches of Elam students before I retired and
left the country.
This time Fan had stacks of offset printed packs of a dozen colour
postcards selling for 10 and 15 RMB (only two or three NZ dollars), with sales adding to his income from occasional
teaching. He employed a lovely young local woman to take care of his exhibition
and card shop while taking in the competition, and seeing friends at PIP. He's
got a fruitful imagination and a nice sense of humour, as well as the
enterprise needed to get anywhere from the bottom up in China. He wouldn't name
a price for his nearly metre-high prints on exhibition because they were
shopworn, but I think he was asking the equivalent of $400 NZ for
them. I was tempted, because they are well worth that.
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| Zoe Zhang and Fan Shunzan, PIP Pingyao 2013 |
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| Zoe Zhang and Fan Shunzan, PIP Pingyao 2013 |
He was not so enthusiastic about Zoe's show, when I asked him to
comment, and later, over dinner, I noted that he puzzled over the meaning of work in Pictures they Want to Make... Which
is precisely what events like PIP are all about - being exposed to unfamiliar
work, and with luck, learning to cross barriers and getting help to figure it
out for oneself.
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| Pingyao International Photography Festival 2013 compendium spread for TINT exhibition. JW Chapman-Taylor's 'Grief' at right |
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| John McGarrigle, American Photo Co. left, and Mac Miller's photograph right |
My own exhibition, 'Tint: a selection of New Zealand photographs
1868-2012 from the collection of John B Turner,' was a late addition because
indications were that I was not been invited to exhibit this year. I wrote most
of the introduction for an intended catalogue but had no time to edit,
translate or publish it within the brief time frame. Nor contact all of the
sources of the pictures, which had to be cut back from 44 to 36 and downsized
to fit the allocated space. Consequently, I did not show work by either John
Fields or Fred Muir, mentioned in the compendium. Nor did I have time to
renumber and improve the design of the PIP translated the wall labels.
Bi-lingual captions are a must for the mainly Chinese audience which wants to
understand the meaning/s of the images.
The photographers represented were Herbert Deveril, DL Mundy,
American Photo Co (John McGarrigle) (2), William J Harding, James Bragge (2),
Alfred H Burton (3), Arthur Northwood (2), William or Fred Tyree (3), Edwin K
Pollard (Tyree studio), James McDonald, G Leslie Adkin (2), JW Chapman-Taylor,
John Pascoe, Les Cleveland, W (Bill) Walker, Ans Westra, Diana Wong, John S
Daley, Alan Leatherby, Glenn Busch, Mac Miller, Bruce Foster, Max Oettli, Paul
Gilbert, Peter Peryer, Peter Black, and one unidentified 19th century
practitioner who copied another's image.
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| Peter Black and G Leslie Adkin images provide the stage for young entertainers |
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| TINT: a selection of New Zealand photographs 1868 to 2012 from collection of John B Turner, PIP 2013 |
The loose theme of the display was a version of New Zealand's
history as a colony, which I was able to expand on in both my official and
spontaneous floor talks. The digitally enlarged copies of original vintage
albumen and silver prints, and facsimilies of 40 year-old gelatin silver and
gold-toned POP "new" prints that I made from original
negatives in the Alexander Turnbull Library, old National Museum, Nelson
Provincial Museum and other sources, were made big for easy viewing and
enjoyment from the rewards of close scrutiny by a new audience. Most were not
as big as I had intended, but they looked pretty good, I think, and certainly
received a lot of interest. The more recent works, unfortunately, had to go on
the shady wall opposite the Barker, Deveril, Mundy, Bragge and Burton works.
But such is Pingyao. It is not an ideal exhibition venue except for having a
huge audience and networking with accomplished foreign and Chinese mainland
photographers and promoters.
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| Miao Miao at Tint exhibition, PIP 2013 |
I don't want to make too big a song, to spoil the dance about it,
but one of my unexpected PIP highlights was when Miao Miao, a lively five year
old local girl, danced for me in the middle of my exhibition. Dragged around by
her big brother, who owns a small restaurant in Pingyao, I gently asked her not
to touch the prints when I saw her feeling a print that had been shifted and
placed low to rescue it from rain dripping from the roof. Not wanting to
extinguish her spark, I asked if I could take some pictures of her, and later,
I asked if she believed in ghosts? She was scared of them, she said, so I told
her how James Bragge had made the ghosts appearing - or disappearing - in his
celebrated picture of the Bank of NZ corner in Wellington around 1879. She said
she was still scared after that, so I showed her how to turn my clever PIP
translator, Julia, into a ghost.
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| Ni Rong: Miao Miao taking the photograph of John Turner, PIP 2013 |
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| Miao Miao (5) Mr Turner, ghost-buster, Tint, PIP 2013 |
Julia almost disappeared when I demonstrated the slow shutter
speed trick to Miao Miao, then it was my turn, when I fell on my back after scaring
the daylights out of a little girl and
her mother whom I backed into while trying to get a more interesting picture. Luckily, only my lenshood was broken
and Miao Miao's dance came to my rescue by restoring a little decorum to the
occasion. I don't know how to edit my my cellphone dance movie, so can't
share it here. The complete TINT show, however, can be seen at
www.jbt.photoshelter.com
with expanded captions. Very soon I should have loaded the installation shots that I owe
to all of the living contributors, individuals and institutions, to whom I give
my grateful thanks. Their pictures continue to inspire and delight me.
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| Julia Jia, PIP volunteer translator, Liu Heungshing, photographer-historian, and Zoe Zhang, photographer-unofficial translator-networker, TINT exhibition, PIP 2013 |
As well as promoting fine New Zealand art, we are, I hope,
encouraging mainland Chinese, and others, to think about starting their own photograph
collections. I had positive comments from many established Chinese
photographers and curators for my early start to collecting. The only criticism,
twice voiced, was that it would have been better (for them) to see the original
prints that I had brought from New Zealand. Viewers were particularly impressed
when I pointed out that a different copy of Peter Peryer's multiple original
print (the cover image from PhotoForum No 33,
August/September 1976) was currently being auctioned at Webb's in Auckland for
around $NZ5000 (RMB 30,000), when I had purchased it with the other nine
pictures from his Mars Hotel portfolio for $100, 37 years ago.
We can't expect Chinese mainlanders to buy many New Zealand prints but we can
show by example, the benefits from supporting talented artists at the beginning
of their careers, when they most need it. PIP, in fact, does this well by
providing a vital, imperfect environment at low cost, without the high art
pretentions expected of a dealer gallery. Then it is up to anybody with eyes to
sort out for themselves which work is entertaining, enlightening, or desirable?
We don't need to be told when we come
across the rare life-changing work, but
image by image, we can learn more about our world and ourselves.
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| Volunteers Hanging Tint, Diesel Factory A5, PIP 2013 |
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| Early visitors, US and South African shows in background, Diesel Factory A5, PIP 2013 |
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| Hanging Tint, Diesel Factory A5, PIP 2013 |
The PIP 2013 compendium, titled 2013 China Pingyao
International Photography Festival, will not be available from New Zealand
shops because PIP's local government and central government backers do not
print enough, and don't seem to understand that what happens at PIP is of
interest to a far larger audience than just those who can attend the festival.
They might not sell like fresh dumplings, but their yearly publications should
be treasured as a record of the progress of photography as a means of
communication and expression in China. As such, they should be in every
important art library. But having said this, my confidence was dented when I
could not readily get approval from the best Fine Arts Library in New Zealand
(Elam's) to buy the copy of last year's compendium that I had purchased on spec
for them.
Chinese photography, you see, like New Zealand photography 40
years ago in our own country, is not yet being recognised for its scope or vitality. Even
PhotoForum, understandably, because of its primary mandate to promote New
Zealand photography, has been slow to showcase outstanding work from The
Peoples Republic of China.
Nor, for that matter, is the New Zealand art scene properly celebrating
the work of Chinese New Zealanders like Diana Wong and KT Ho. Part of the
problem is the Chinese reticence to put themselves forward, but also there can
be a language and cultural barrier, not to mention an individual's personality,
behind their modesty. Our NZ Chinese artists have their own clubs, such as
Photo Whisper, and the United Chinese Photography Association of New Zealand,
which recently had a show in Parliament Buildings, opened by Prime Minister
John Key. They also produced a book, The Land of the Long White Cloud -
New Zealand through Chinese Lens (sic.) as a heartfelt eulogy to the
natural beauty of our small island nation, expressed, usually, with exceptional
technical competence. Yes... but...! I am not certain, however, if
anybody capable of writing a critical review was ever shown it, let alone giving
public expression of the serious attention it deserves.
Nor is going to be easy to get New Zealand institutions to exhibit
outstanding Chinese photography in meaningful ways, or within the rapid
timelines expected by many Chinese. We all know that pictures can still strip
away some of the language barriers and political grandstanding that tends to
stunt serious attempts to communicate and educate. New Zealanders know that the
true value of overseas experience is to discover who they are and what it means
to be a citizen of the South Pacific. From this end, in China, there
is a queue of exemplary photographers who would like to show their work
overseas, and study at first hand the work of admired occidental peers. All
they need is the kind of helping hand extended by practitioners from all around
the world, whom they meet at Pingyao and other festivals, which are veritable
hives of networking and good will.
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| JBTat Love Begonia exhibition PIP 2013 |
Note. Unless otherwise stated I am guilty of taking these photographs.
