This is partly at update on my featured photography exhibition at Head On in Sydney at the beginning of May. Hopefully this coronavirus situation will stabilise sooner rather than later. Although my background is photojournalism and editorial photography, there is less and less work in that field as the media industry experiences serious contraction in the face of the internet and ‘free’ content that the likes of Facebook and Google make billions off.
I’m mainly a commercial photographer these days, but that work has evaporated as China is put under lockdown. The best case scenario I can think of is that things get back to normal by the beginning of April. I have already had a few events cancelled, but hopefully Shanghai Fashion Week can go ahead as planned.
But I digress.
I was interested in the theme of decadence in Shanghai from the first time I came to the city in 2010. In the 1920s and 1930s especially Shanghai had a bad reputation that preceded it - a kind of seedy glamour that was exploited in Hollywood films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Shanghai Triad in China. Those bad old days ended when the Second World War hit, followed by the Chinese Civil War and the victory of Mao and his Chinese Communist Party. The book Shanghai: Rise and Fall of a Decadent City by Stella Dong provided some very useful background on this.
As China and Shanghai especially returned to boom times, I was wondering whether there was a link between the past and the present. I had always brought a camera with me when I went out in the evening and had sent a few series on Shanghai nightlife to Polaris, which in turn ended up with one of their partner agencies, Laif in Germany. When GEO magazine in Germany was looking for photographs of Shanghai nightlife, they came across my images and assigned to to shoot a couple of feature articles, one of which was on nightlife.
It was really only then that this series took off because of the contacts I made during the assignment. Quite a few of the images in the series were taken at what was called the Black Swan Party and M1NT. Although I still had to be a bit pushy to get some of the shots I was after, such as the ones from behind the bar, I was basically able to shoot whatever I wanted. M1NT still exists, but its Australian former owner was basically run out of town. It’s a classic Shanghai story, but here isn’t the place to tell it.
Nightclubs tend not to want unauthorised photographers photographing their guests. Things are even more difficult now, but over the course of around a year from late 2013, I got to know a few people in the industry, went out partying with them and took my camera along.
I started off shooting the series on a Nikon D700. I later got a D800, which I’d either use in tandem with the D700 and finally I mainly used a Nikon D3S since it was amazing in low light. Actually modern DSLRs really made this kind of project possible. It was often shot in near darkness with multicoloured lighting that changed every second. The margin for error shooting this way is quite high, but I wanted to keep the ambient light, which I felt gave the series a cinematic feel.
I do shoot a lot of luxury events for commercial clients as well as for Women’s Wear Daily, but the work in the series Shanghai: Decadence with Chinese Characteristics is quite different as it’s about setting a mood and trying to tell a story or piece of a larger narrative in a single photo. Although people are out partying, much of the series is strangely melancholy. Also, when I was shooting this series for myself I could keep chasing a shot without thinking of all the things I had to cover or the client’s expectations. I’ve working at a few parties that I thought would have great material for my Decadence series, but the mind set required for my assignments for Women’s Wear Daily or for brands is quite different. I can’t chase a single shot all night if I’m working for them - I’m always thinking about which boxes I need to tick. This isn’t necessarily a complaint, mind you. The series has taught me that I can’t think two ways simultaneously.
I’ve digressed again. Hopefully I’ll be able to travel to Sydney to attend the opening of the show on May the 1st at the Head On photography festival. The exhibition is going to be outdoors at the Paddington Reservoir Gardens.
More work at www.davetacon.com
