quelquefois

Days away from home: 25
Conferences: 1
Countries: 3-5 (depending on who you ask)
Special Administrative Regions: 2 (Hong Kong, Macau)
Cities: 15+ (Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Halong City/Bay, Dong Dang, Pingxiang, Nanning, Guilin, Yangshuo, Chongqing, Wanzhou, Yichang, Wuhan, Beijing)
Stamps on passport: 12
Delicious meals: innumerable
Cases of diarrhea or food poisoning: zero
Bout of sickness: 1
Days with dehydration-related headaches: several
Modes of transportation: 7 (boat, car, bus, train, airplane, motorbike, walking)
Photographs taken: 1699

(See larger map here.)

My photographs of the aftermath of the TVCC fire in Beijing in February have gotten the attention of Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), and they’re going to feature some of my photographs on their slideshow about it soon. I will report back when it’s up. Unfortunately I’m not paid for it, but I’m happy for any publicity.

My bike is my new best friend. It takes me any and everywhere I need to go. Last Friday, I biked from the post office to a photo developer in Dongcheng District. I arrived at 4:25 only to find out that it closed at 4:00. Then I biked to dinner with a friend, and from there home, for a total of around 15 miles. It was a great bike ride, I saw many things. The downside is that I have inhaled an unfathomable amount of smog that blankets Beijing on most days.

My bike route

Sunset on East Chang’an Ave

Chairman Mao is never alone

The restaurant

Trying to get seated

An empty Tiananmen Square

Thanks for the $100 USD as prize money for the best photograph this semester.

Sincerely,
The “abstract” artist

Don’t tell me you have a photo contest that “should have creative composition” and then once I submit them, tell me that my photos are too “抽象” (chou1 xiang4, abstract). And don’t go even further and tell me that the winner will have 2 or more students in it. If you told me you wanted Asian-style group photos, you could have just said so, and I wouldn’t have wasted all my time post-processing my photos.

I want all my photos back. You cannot use them as propaganda for your crappy program.

Sincerely,
A artistic girl in an unartistic country

I dearly miss the artistic environment I was immersed in while I was at Brown and in NYC. It didn’t help that I went from thinking about photography 24/7 to feeling apathetic and uninspired. Let’s not get into all the reasons, but something that really puts me off is that everything in Chinese cities looks the same: too many people, ugly buildings and infrastructure, and pollution. Though really, that’s no excuse. I’ll have to start thinking creatively and hopefully I’ll find some inspiration in The-City-That-Knows-No-Art (a.k.a Harbin). Seriously, there is no art. Anywhere.

I have taken hundreds more photos in July thus far than in all of June. Now that I’m back in the groove, I am looking at everything with a critical eye again. I was disenchanted with photography for a while–a combination of both exhaustion (from my RISD class) and skepticism about my talent. Through museums, galleries, compliments, and classes, I have rediscovered and even emboldened my passion for it. I can’t wait to take more photographs as I learn more techniques and expand my knowledge of the art form. You know, get some hardc0re l33t skillz.

Unfortunately, I still have severe writer’s block. New York and photography drain so much from me that I can’t muster anything else up for this.

I went to the MoMA with a friend (and her family friends) on Sunday. Some of my favorite pieces are…First, Vasily Kadinsky’s Four Panels. I looooove his use of color, and how he believed that color exemplifies emotion. He has said, “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings.” Second, Dorothea Lange’s photography is beautiful, and revolutionized documentary style photography. I also love her because many of her pieces are from the Bay Area in the early 1900s, and it’s fascinating what something so familiar to me now looked 60 years ago. She serves as a role model. Third, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (below left). I found this piece interesting because it’s almost identical to a piece by one of my favorite photographers, Ellen Kooi (below right). Observe:

Those are a few highlights of my visit. I really liked the contemporary art exhibits, as well, although some of it bordered on kitsch.

My friend and I had made it to the second floor Prints and Illustrated Books exhibit when I started to feel sore in my entire body. I stretched, and one of the guards came up to me and said jokingly, “There’s no exercising in the museum.” He introduced himself as Nelly. He is from Jamaica, Queens. He asked where I am from, and if I am an artist. I told him I am in New York City for the summer, and that I did documentary style photography, but by no means would I consider myself an “artist.”

“Nah, that’s an artist all right!” He started spewing off names of photographers that I may or may not have actually heard of. I nodded instinctively while he did this.

He told me that I could photograph him playing chess, “a beautiful game,” or even poker. He told me he would show me the real New York, “none of this fancy artsy shit you see ’round here.” He proceed to give me his number and ended with, “You gon’ holla at me, right?”

Now, I’m not naïve to the point that I don’t know what it means when someone gives me a phone number. And believe me, there isn’t a single thought in my head that makes me want to do anything in any horizontal position with him. But what if I did want to see a different side of New York? Could I be making a new friend? What’s the protocol for this type of situation?

to becoming a better photographer? Today I asked my photography professor to take a look at one of my scanned color negatives (negatives from a manual camera) to see if I was on the right track with my editing. He told me that he was really impressed with my work, and that he did not tell people that often.

None of my work was done using any “auto” features. I meticulously tweaked curves, tones, color balances, saturations, hues, noise reducers, and sharpening to get that piece of shit image on the left to the still-in-progress result on the right. Okay, you probably got none of that. Bottom line: made my day.

I am taking a class at RISD–Digital Photography, and I love it so much. It is no doubt one of the most time consuming classes I have ever taken, but seriously one of the most fulfilling. I am learning so much about image and color correction (wow, did I just say I was excited about working with CURVES and HISTOGRAMS?), that I can’t wait to see my *own* images transform from shit to sexy (our professor’s nomenclature).

Note to Canon 5d: I have my eye on you. Just you wait (until I have this thing called “income”). Once Canon updates you, you know I’ll be there, waiting, drooling.