At this moment in Shanghai it seems most things are at a standstill. Commercial photography projects are either cancelled or on indefinite hold. It’s hard to make plans in these circumstances, but I’m still intending to be in Sydney for the Head On photography festival, which kicks off on May 1st.
I think if I was ever going to attend a photography festival, it should be this one since I have work in three shows. I’ve already posted about Shanghai: Decadence with Chinese Characteristics and the Paper Tigers anthology of Australian photojournalism. The other show is Yangtze, which as the name suggests is about the Yangtze River China’s longest river. This one is at 541 Art Space on Kent Street in Sydney’s CBD.
I am working with the curator Eleanor Megna on the image selection and I’m leaning towards double hanging since all the images are horizontal panoramas and quite a bit narrower than regular prints.
I shot the first images for this series at the end of 2015. This first shots just happened more or less by chance when I wandered down to the Yangtze River after I’d spent a night in Wuhan on assignment for The Australian newspaper. I shot two or maybe three rolls of Kodak Portra 400 in my Hasselblad Xpan on a foggy morning. I had good feeling about the shots and it turned out that I managed to get maybe half a dozen good images. I thought why not continue the series along the river. It may be hard for some to believe, but I was completely oblivious to Nadav Kandar’s well-known work, The River. Still, this work predates the Three Gorges Dam and in some ways China is a very different place today than it was then. That dam was only one piece of unprecedented development, much of it is happening along the Yangtze, so I thought that the project was certainly worth pursuing even purely due to my own interest in it.
The series has changed a bit since I started. I figured that I would shoot it as a black and white series, so I started using very cheap Agfafilm Vista 400. As far as I can tell this film is actually Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400. Back when I began, I could pick this up for 18 RMB per roll. Fujifilm have since discontinued this packaging and incredibly enough this film now sells in Shanghai for around triple the price as previously - even more than Superia. Whatever the canister this emulsion comes in, it’s a good honest consumer film. The grain is pretty chunky and you don’t get nearly as much exposure latitude as with professional negative film like Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm Pro 400H. A friend who works at a lab says it can handle about two stops over exposure, which seems about right. You can maybe get away with being a stop under, but contrast and saturation spiked noticeably. Still, it’s quite versatile film for what it is. I’ve got around 30 rolls of this still in the fridge. It’s the roll I’d most often put in a point and shoot camera.
Anyway, once I decided to keep Yangtze as a colour series, I graded the images a bit by dragging the saturation down by around 20% to get them a bit closer to the subdued look of Portra 400 or Pro 400H. At one point I was also shooting rolls twice with one body and shooting regular rolls just once in another. Now, I think I’m close to finished or maybe I am finished with this project.
I had hoped to get to the somewhere near the Yangtze’s origin a glacial lake in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Then again, maybe I don’t even need to go there. Technically, the Yangtze begins where the Min and Jinsha Rivers meet in Yibin, Sichuan Province and then flow all the way to Shanghai taking up the flow of more tributaries along the way. I’ve photographed where these two rivers meet and in every province it passes through from there. Maybe I should call it Yangtze: A Journey from Sichuan to Shanghai.
I do have ambitious Chinese travel plans for my borders project, but I may well have to scrap or greatly curtail them once commercial photography picks up again in Shanghai and China in general.
But I digress again. Instead of explaining the significance of the project to me here, I may as well drop my artists statement below and show some of the work, which might be appearing in Sydney. Hope you like the pictures.
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The Yangtze is a central character in a struggle between man and nature. For millennia this mighty river, China’s longest, has been a source of life as well as destruction through catastrophic floods and droughts. A series of dams including the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam are China’s ongoing attempt to bring this river to heel.
One in every 15 people on earth live within the Yangtze watershed. This work will survey the ten provinces through which the Yangtze River passes, from its source - a remote glacial lake in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau - to its industrialized delta with Shanghai at its mouth. The bright sunshine of the upper reaches gives way to a pollution haze, a symptom of China’s unprecedented economic boom. Between these two extremes, I have been drawn to quiet and introspective moments shared between the river and those drawn to it in places wholly unfamiliar to most non-Chinese: such as the ethnic minority enclaves in the mountains of Yunnan, with their border-town-feel, to the grey industrial river cities of Anhui, each thousands of miles apart.
The entire project will be shot on an out-of-production panoramic film camera. This cinematic format forces me to slow down the process and make each frame more meditative.
I am undertaking this work to try to come to a more intimate understanding of the country in which I have lived for six years. I have never ceased to marvel at how fast China erases the old and replaces it with a futuristic new without a whiff of nostalgia. So much has already been lost and I am compelled to document what remains before it vanishes, unremembered.
www.headon.com.au
More work at www.davetacon.com
