who is behind the camera
yesterday a friend of mine gave an impressive comment on my latest photographs of shanghai which made me wonder what the actual fuck i'm doing. based on what she said, my photos mostly don't have a unique perspective and look like any other casual image that anyone can take in the same situation. for sure, she is a photography scholar who has a much deeper knowledge of the field than someone like me who just takes pictures for fun, but at the same time, it made me look back to the pictures i took for the last 6 months to track down a specific pattern.
i discovered that the more i take pictures of the same area, the more i find unique and vibrant frames. for instance, i went to the bund more than other places in shanghai and my first couple of pictures looked like a stereotypical tourist fascinated by the skyscrapers and modern architecture of the city. then i checked more recent pictures and i noticed there are many attempts to narrate a story or just film the site as a form of documentation. at the same time, i found those spots less fascinating as i grew to distance myself from the rapid expansion of the capitalist. now i was trying to uncover the darker sides of this modernity by throwing light on the marginalized aspects of the technocratic refinement. regardless, currently, i was coming upon a new issue that was tossing me into the pitfall of being a cynical foreigner searching for exotic corners of an asian country.
this was the moment that i chose to deactivate my instagram and quit posting photos on twitter (aka x). since the majority of my audience on both of those platforms were people outside of china, i acknowledged the agenda i'm pushing unconsciously was just another biased take on a mysterious zone (the amount of discourse on china is apparently more intriguing and engaging). frankly, this wasn't the only reason i deactivated those platforms (cliffhanger for the next posts), but i felt somehow regretful about my way of observing, and the same goes for the way i used to take photos of my friends. i believe on some levels, i did a better job on that part since i had more profound interactions with them so i could convert their personality to the photographs with less effort. still, even for those pictures, i saw the same pattern but on a more interpersonal level. the first photos missed that sense of intimacy and personality, but the more i took, the better they got.
i believe while everyone talks about the ways of seeing the world, there is much less talk about the ways of framing it as more involved observers. clearly, i'm not a professional photographer and at the end of the day, i see photography as a hobby, but at the same time, i think i have a responsibility about the way i offer a frame to a greater audience since that one frame can shape someone's insight of a phenomenon. another criticism that i got was the fact that i distanced myself from the subject. i stay far from what i want to capture in a way it feels like i'm scared of getting engaged with them. after revising my photos, i understood this is another accurate take on both groups of the pictures. in the case of friend photos, i got more intimate with subjects within the advancement of our relationship. on the other hand, it seems like i'm stretching to distance myself from the subjects in the city. is it because i'm growing to dislike shanghai and the mega-city it is or it's just a phase in my (probably) 3 years journey in the city? for now i don't have an answer to this question but i want to observe the city in other ways. i decided to give myself a break from photography and make an effort to examine the ways my eyes work which i think is more crucial at the moment.