Turning Point

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Turning Point

A mile from Zhang Jiang High Technology Park, Shanghai, 2007

I should be writing to tell you all about 2010 (screw 2011!), but I’m knee-deep in my scanning and planning my next photographic expedition. To tide you over till next week (I promise), here’s an (extended version of) article I wrote for last year’s fLIP magazine about a particular turning point in my photographic life.

The closest I got to ever having a mentor was a photographer who came straight from the old school. He arrived in New York from Italy with nothing but an ancient Nikon on his back and worked his way to the top, running in the company of luminaries like Koudelka, Salgado and Cartier-Bresson.

His exacting approach to composition required each component of the frame to contribute to the overall image. No redundant elements were tolerated and despite my anguished pleas, ‘failed’ images were brutally culled during our reviews. He explained that such passengers served no purpose but to reveal the compromises the photographer had allowed himself to make and were fundamentally an indication of weakness.

Despite my initial reservations, this philosophy ultimately appealed to my precise nature. I had started out by photographing people candidly, trying to impose a sense of order to human chaos by incorporating more and more duelling elements into the picture. I began to juggle, balancing individuals in mid-flight, coordinating a curious dance of strangers. Here then was an exhilarating adventure: learning to sense the edges of a crowd as it coalesced and dispersed before me, relying upon instinct, persistence and blind luck, revelling in the wonderful simplicity and complexity of it all.

But after a few years, it grew increasingly frustrating, repetitive and most distressingly of all, futile. What was the point of the compositional games I was playing? What was I trying to say, why was I even bothering to do any of this? Habit and compulsion were no longer sufficient justifications. I was left with a surfeit of questions and a dearth of satisfactory answers.

…

I tried to shake things up, making different types of pictures to separate myself from the past. I meandered aimlessly for months before I made this photograph, far from home and completely outside of my comfort zone.

In hindsight, the answer was blindingly obvious. There was nothing preventing me from still making complex, precisely-arranged compositions. What was required was the appreciation that the quiescent tableau could be of greater significance to me than the decisive moment.

With this realisation, I finally broke free from the frenetic pace of my photographic youth. I could focus on what I was trying to say and how to go about saying it, giving sufficient attention to ideas, themes and metaphors instead of constantly reacting to situations beyond my control. Now I was able to work on my own terms.

Nothing of this experience could be considered particularly revelatory, other than that it being uniquely personal. As photographers, we all must come to some kind of private accommodation, rationalisation or delusion that justifies the cost of our efforts. A few years ago on a cold winter’s morning in the outskirts of Shanghai, I just happened to stumble across mine.