What I Saw
My photographs concern margins and the marginal, in their myriad forms. A justification is available in post-structuralist terms -- no understanding is possible without consideration of borders, fragments, and the excluded and forgotten. I suspect, though, that the source of my fascination is biographical.
I immigrated from Taiwan to Ohio in the 1970s, plucked from one world and cast down overnight into another at the age of 9. Add to that spatial-cultural-linguistic disruption a compelled, first-time confrontation with race -- of being seen as an inferior other when I had never before contemplated the possibility -- and with class -- of tasting deprivation when I never had an expectation of more -- and, well, looking at the world off-kilter becomes second nature. When there is no longer a center, there are no borders, either.
No place is indispensable, no moment decisive. Elusive fragments instead of the unitary whole. Everything is possible -- and maybe even worth looking at.
***
I have photographed for a long time, but compulsively only in the last few years. My newfound urgency tracks the medium's primordial impulse: To stop time. Larry Sultan put this well. He wrote that although he can offer a plethora of justifications for his decade-long project of photographing his parents, the truest explanation may be the simplest: "[T]he wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever." Pictures from Home (1992).
Mortality is never far from mind. The camera freezes time.
To encounter my photographs is to encounter me. Meyerowitz's answer to the question, "What are we all trying to get to in the making of anything?" approaches the truth: "We're trying to get to ourselves." Cape Light (2002 ed.).
In the end, though, all photographs become Rorschach blots. Whatever a picture may be to me, it is an invitation to you: Consider and reflect, accept or reject.
Come, and see what I saw.
Yuanchung Lee
BA (Northwestern), MA (Brown), JD (Yale)
Resides in New York City
email: yuanchung_lee(at)yahoo.com
blog: yclee2cents.blogspot.com
My photographs concern margins and the marginal, in their myriad forms. A justification is available in post-structuralist terms -- no understanding is possible without consideration of borders, fragments, and the excluded and forgotten. I suspect, though, that the source of my fascination is biographical.
I immigrated from Taiwan to Ohio in the 1970s, plucked from one world and cast down overnight into another at the age of 9. Add to that spatial-cultural-linguistic disruption a compelled, first-time confrontation with race -- of being seen as an inferior other when I had never before contemplated the possibility -- and with class -- of tasting deprivation when I never had an expectation of more -- and, well, looking at the world off-kilter becomes second nature. When there is no longer a center, there are no borders, either.
No place is indispensable, no moment decisive. Elusive fragments instead of the unitary whole. Everything is possible -- and maybe even worth looking at.
***
I have photographed for a long time, but compulsively only in the last few years. My newfound urgency tracks the medium's primordial impulse: To stop time. Larry Sultan put this well. He wrote that although he can offer a plethora of justifications for his decade-long project of photographing his parents, the truest explanation may be the simplest: "[T]he wish to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live forever." Pictures from Home (1992).
Mortality is never far from mind. The camera freezes time.
To encounter my photographs is to encounter me. Meyerowitz's answer to the question, "What are we all trying to get to in the making of anything?" approaches the truth: "We're trying to get to ourselves." Cape Light (2002 ed.).
In the end, though, all photographs become Rorschach blots. Whatever a picture may be to me, it is an invitation to you: Consider and reflect, accept or reject.
Come, and see what I saw.
Yuanchung Lee
BA (Northwestern), MA (Brown), JD (Yale)
Resides in New York City
email: yuanchung_lee(at)yahoo.com
blog: yclee2cents.blogspot.com