Dave Wyatt

I made a second trip to the Botanical gardens in Dalian on the 26th November on a quest to shoot the rest of the exercise spaces there and make the most of the tripod that I didn’t have last time I was there, and have a go at getting slightly different takes on the chairs in the lake image that is currently in my edit for the leisure book (see a post with the pdf that will be here in about a week or two).  I noticed on the the main scenes with the cross beam between 2 trees now had bright yellow tape over the beam so reshot this before moving on to a few of the other trees that now stood out more due to this yellow tape and some spaces I had not noticed on my previous visit.

Dalian Botanical Gardens. Dalian. Liaoning. China. 26th November 2008

Amusingly I gathered quite a bit of interest while doing this and after an hur or so had a solid fan base of 5 spectators following me through the woodland.  I remember when I first started out in photography and being shy to the point of not even liking taking pictures in front of people let alone of people and now here I am, wondering through a random bit of woodland in China with 5 guys just following and staring in utter bemusement at what I am doing.  Wish I had shot some portraits of them now but oh well, my complete lack of language means it is difficult to achieve anything approaching intimacy in portraits here so I choose to avoid them, instead feeling that the landscape speaks far more intimately about my relationship with the Chinese and all of our relationships with the landscape.  I still feel that nagging voice in the back of my head that I should be making portraits though but I worry if that is genuine or if it is just me trying to do what I think I should do rather than continuing to just respond in my own vision to the questions in my head.

Dalian Botanical Gardens. Dalian. Liaoning. China. 26th November 2008

Before I start, in case he reads this, sorry for the title Mike, couldn’t resist really!  Anyway, went for a walk done in Xinghai a couple of weeks ago just for a break from the essay writing really, I forget the exact date but it must have been around the 20th of November or so.  Didn’t take the tripod cos it wasn’t really anything formal, just a chance for fresh air but took the camera down with me seeing as the cloud was dull and low.

Came across the deserted amusements from the summer that looked much like I remember the ones back home when I visit Weston during the off season.  I always found these places so much more interesting visually when they are abandoned, something slightly eerie and melancholy about them.  I could go on about ideas of how these things remind me of childhood dreams and the like that didn’t quite pan out as expected but you get the idea.  I find the aspects of how an area thrives during the on season and then becomes so desolate during the winter months more in tune with my experience.  Anyone from around small season areas would be able to relate to this concept

Anyway, I have added one image to this post that I feel sums up the ideas I am talking about well.  The closed down confectionery stand with the fake rock behind that would appear to now be home to someone from the look of the makeshift curtain doorway.  The flat lighting helps as well add to the general feeling of a loss of innocence felt by the kids who would have been buying ice-cream here only 2 months ago.  The large fake rock is built as well to make people feel that the large park this is in that has been transformed for tourism is really still a natural environment, with the explanation mark sprayed on just to remind people that the natural is far to dangerous and they should remain in areas where their money can be procured.  In reality all that was once natural has been laid waste in the the urban sprawl.  Dalian serves as an interesting example of this with the Mayor in the ate 1980s adding many green parks for people to relax in.  The only problem is most of these have given way to commercial ventures and remain only as a weak facsimile of the natural environment, the remnants of which are only seen in the steep surrounding hills that are inaccessible but still littered with power stations, quarries and pylons.

Weather today was good for shooting and I’m sure it will be one of the last during this trip to China so I went out and shot a load of film today all from Xinghai Square and Eastwards through the Shell Museum (a giant recreation of a fairy tale castle) and out along Binhai Xi Lu again.

Before I get too engrossed i should add that I have been shooting since the last post, just lost my internet last week and have yet to catch up with the missing posts.  That and book editing have been taking up all my time lately so expect a flurry of posts about the past couple of weeks over the next few days.

The plan was to go down to the zoo to re shoot a couple of images that were soft from my earlier inability to pull my thumb out of my arse and use a tripod, and after much deliberation decided on the decent end for the day with an early go at the bathtubs again with better light.  As is often the case with me this plan went to the wall almost as soon as I got off the tram to walk to the zoo the long way through Xinghai Square.  I’ve never really shot much in there so trees with fairy lights attached and the plugs hanging loose by the trunks was too much to pass up really…

After making a nuisance of myself sufficiently around the main bits of the Square including trampling through the flower beds with the tripod to get something interesting with the colour purple (photo will be here in about 2-3 days) and annoying a sleeping policeman enough was enough.  There should be quite a few interesting images from all of this and one of the things that I really found helpful in removing the distraction of having everyone stare at me like I’m from Mars (its really, really off-putting sometimes for those of us with no desire to join the stage) was having the iPod on.  Gogol Bordello to the rescue again!  Something about their music always puts me in a happy and inquisitive mood (and want to drink vodka for some reason..!) so I think it added to my work today.

Anyway, went up the Shell museum as well and made some interesting I hope images of electricity cables coming out of a window.  Doesn’t sound that great but the window is made to look like a fairytale castle and these were big think cables, so it should work.

Oh, and the other place I managed to get to today was the bathtubs again, and I think at pretty much the same time as last time so we shall see what the lighting was like.  Thinking tomorrow morning is the time to go and get the definitive shot -it looks like it will snow later in the week so this could work as well but would like a well lit non snowy shot to start with.  As has been my habit lately I went off wondering again in the little trails at the sides of the road today and I swear i spend as much time treading around people’s makeshift toilets as i do making images, but I think it is worth it.  I found a whole area covered in empty clam and oyster shells today in a bit of woodland so I think that tactic of exploration is worth it photographically.  Hell, I enjoy so even if the images are no good I’ll still keep exploring.

Bathtubs. Dalian. China. 2008.

I realise I have not been updating this as much as I possibly could recently so thought I would add something about what I have been working on lately.  Today being the last day to finish the 1st draft of my MA dissertation means my head has been in the books recently but I have been trying to get out and about to shoot and find new and interesting locations for later shoots.  One thing I have been expressly looking at is the sports areas flood lit at night.  I’ve visited a few of these now but have to find one that is going to be appropriate -either the flood lights are insufficient to allow me to make a useable image or there is nowhere from which I can get a suitable vantage point.  I swear with my current quest to find high ground I feel like a sniper half the time.

One thing that has become clear over the past few weeks of shooting and looking at work for my paper on contemporary practice, I am becoming more and more interested in the periphery of spaces.  This idea has been addressed before in Mark Power’s 26 Different Endings and Steffi Klenz’s (of Nonsuch fame, a series that heavily influenced my Thames Town work) A Scape.  Both if these bodies of work concern the edge of the city of London, Power in regards to how we artificially create borders and Klenz in an examination of the nature of a space in flux.

What I am interested in with this periphery concept within leisure spaces is how we have a more fluid relationship with the landscape.  These spaces are less about the commoditisation of the land and present more of a balance between man and the land.  However when we dig deeper we see that this is still a highly managed landscape and our relationship is still one of dominance over all.

Shooting wise I have also been revisiting spaces now that it is November and officially the off-season.  Ever sonce first picking up a camera I have been obsessed with the notion of a landscape virtually abandoned during the winter months with only the remnants of a vibrant summer industry left behind.  Never sure that the images I capture of this are not overly cliched but if nothing else there is something both calming and poignant about photographing something so familiar when so far from home.

This leads me onto another point about my work that has become more focused and resolute in my mind.  By attempting to a China so different than the manufacturing giant depicted in the western news, or the mystical historically rich ideal of the travel books, my work is attempting to comment on globalisation and homogenisation of culture, how in the 21st century the global culture means that the land is shaped in much the same way no matter where you are based and it is only in the small details that we can see references to individual cultures coming through.  Those spaces that are altered by groups of people and not by industry are the spaces where we will be able to truly observe some level of individual culture.

On a technical note it has been difficult to add images lately because I blew a harddrive and as such have to redo all corrections on my film based work.  I knew I should have burnt the back up disks last week…  It also meant I lost 95% of the digital work I shot in China but I am strangely calm about this and find if anything it actually to be a freeing experience.  The only images I truly rated I have A3 sized copies available of and the rest to be honest were in two modes -a form of diary of my initial time here, annoying to lose but lets be honest, I would have never even converted the RAW files anyway (I am not and never have been one to shoot in this way before or after my first 2 months in China -I just have no interest in photography outside of using it as a method to explore my ideas.  I guess this is a family thing because there are relatively few snapshots of us from my childhood when compared to the horrendous experience most we are subjected to when other families pull out the photo album).  The other lost pictures were just my initial explorations, all of which have led to the work I am doing now but form only the basis of the initial ideas.  That they represent the desire for me to leave behind the more reportage style for the time being would have been interesting to look at again but overall their loss feels almost like a weight has been lifted -the sum of my work in China will rest in that which is on the physical artefact that is film.

On a whim, partly because I felt I was yet t have made a successful picture there and partly because I wanted to go exploring, I went back to Labour Park in Dalian a few days ago to work my way up to the top, Lu Shan, and have a look around for more of the subtle (comparatively speaking) signs of our influence and control over the environment.  I found a whole series of spaces used for tai qi and other morning rituals and also some presumably for more violent martial arts further up the hill.  Also had an interesting experience with the local, ‘wildlife’ again when a couple decide to get together in the background of one of my shots while a strange guy crouched and watched them from the bushes, completely uninterested in the fact he was in full view of me.  I guess the wooded edges of city parks are pretty much the same no matter what country you are in…

Anyway, here are a few random selects from the shoot that have caught my eye initially.

Castagnoli’s work -Provincial Japan, is available to download from his site and is a very interesting look at Japan form a Western perspective, utilising a very western style reminiscent of the work of the new Topographics and also more contemporary artists such as Joel Sternfeld and Mark Power, but with a more snapshot aesthetic in his representation of colour.  The work is very relevant to mine when looked at in light of Edward Said’s theories of Orientalism and as such will be included in my dissertation in relation to how it represents the East from a Western perspective.

You can look at Castagnoli’s work on his website here: Guido Castagnoli

Thanks to the ever valuable Conscientious blog run by Joerg Colberg for this info which I would have undoubtably missed otherwise.  The web does have its uses afterall…

Thought these would be better in a separate post to keep things uncluttered.  Anyway, here are some more of the spaces cleared for exercise, this time in Xinghai Park.

©Dave Wyatt 2008

©Dave Wyatt 2008

Just for all the haters out there I spent a couple of days this week in Xinghai looking for images that were completely different than the usual from what is quite possibly the most photographed part of China by the MA course -its an easy location to test ideas out and get used to China when you first arrive, I should know, I still have around 3000 digital images off my old Canon I need to edit properly.

Anyway, on Wednesday I stupidly didn’t take the tripod out with me, even after knowing how much it is essential on the more dull days and is generally a wise more to slow my image making down.  I managed to make images for about an hour, maybe 2, until I was down to shooting at 1/30 at f4.0 which was useless so packed it in for the day.  Once again, I need to carry my tripod.

Anyway, I spent the time basically rooting around in the arts of the park away from the main paths and found a few areas marked out for Tai Chi, similar in concept to the ones in the Botanical Gardens.  Due to my general uselessness of no tripod I will have to see whether these will work with the shallow depth of field or not, ideally if I was working that angle properly I would have a 5×4 down there and use some movements to really isolate just little traces of footprints or the like in sharp focus with the rest falling off, but for now I’m relying less on camera trickery and more on just the sense of tranquil space created around a manipulated environment to make my point.  I’m going to post some of these images in a separate post for now and just include the the later ones here.

©Dave Wyatt 2008

Before the light completely vanished and the rain came I managed to make some images around the closed up shower facilities and the green areas adjacent.  Not 100% yet but think these should be ok technically -they were not in amongst trees and so there was enough light to gain sufficient depth of field.

©Dave Wyatt 2008

©Dave Wyatt 2008

After the balls up of not taking the tripod I went down to Xinghai again on thursday with the tripod in tow.  The sun was much brighter today but patchy cloud meant I could make images with and without scattered light to see which work more effectively.  Traditionally I’m always thinking that even lighting s better but then I look at work like that of Michael Schmidt’s and his woman in a park image with mottled light hitting her through the leaves and i think I should really experiment with this a lot more, so now consciously make the effort to shoot the same scene in different lighting to see how it looks on film.

I basically re shot the same images as the day before plus more from the last section people use for Tai Chi that had been occupied the previous day.  I liked this last area because it had the option of standing on a raised up section to shoot slightly downwards which is a viewpoint I both like ad feel is sorely missing form some of the images. A step ladder would be a good purchase… (plus naturally a bigger tripod then, oh the joys…).  Interesting (well to me at least) side note, this spot is either where the local (non existent according to those in charge) gay male population hang out looking for ‘friends’ or I have the worst luck in the world for men exposing themselves to the camera for me…  Kicking myself for not releasing the shutter in any of the right moments but I get enough problems from my lab as it is without those images as well.  I also shot a load of frames of two kites in the sky, tiny with the lenses I had with me but the idea would be to print these big;  Its an experiment really after looking at some Joel Sternfeld work recently.

©Dave Wyatt 2008

Headed over to another slightly wooded area after this where I know more pensioners meet ot play cards and practice Tai Chi.  Was hoping to find more of the lashed on brace beams like in the Botanical gardens but alas there were none.  Spent some time shooting a manhole cover in an apparently tranquil forest though and some random concrete blocks.  Not sure how successful these will be but it was interesting to shoot them nonetheless.

Just taking the work to the lab now so hopefully they won’t screw loads of them up this time (last zoo trip I lost about 10 frames due to fogging, most likely when the films were being loaded into the machine.  Annoying but at about 80p for a whole roll of 120 to be developed and scanned to 72mb each -about 5000 px square, I can live with remembering to reshoot any image on the end of a roll again at the beginning of the next roll…)

Now I have collected this work from the lab I thought I would add a few of the images rathert han write too much about the place.  I have a few ideas for new projects from here and want to return to produce a few more images in the more forested area with a tripod.  The first images show exercise sites adapted from the natural environment which is a relevant to my leisure work but I’m more interested in collating images of around 20 of these locations to form a small book speaking about a positive way for an urban populace to embrace the natural without destroying it.

So while those images are the beginnings of that one series, I also have a couple of single images that form the basis of a thought process for other new projects.  I have been wanting to do a piece on pylons for a while now but keep delaying because I see other people publishing similar work so become disillusioned about producing the work but feel this image is of the style I want them to be.  I am interested in how they appear to hide amongst trees and even pretend to be trees as if in some kind of of child’s fantasy.

Lastly for now there is one last image which I have not yet decided how to continue with, whether this and the pylons link together or if this is a separate piece I am not yet sure, maybe they all work as separate typological sets.  I know how I want to shoot the images so maybe I should think more about the presentation when I have produced more of the sets.

Seeing as it has been ages since i last posted anything I figured I should update on my movements really.  Since Guizhou (I’ll post about that trip a bit later) and the zoo trip the other week I have been wrestling with the dreaded lurgy and also shitty weather so not had the pportunity to shoot so much, but managed a couple of shoots that are in at the lab as I type.

Returned to the open section of the zoo again before it closes for the year because I have put so much focus on the enclosed section, but i will post more about this tomorrow when i get the images back.  Essentially I focused on the same subjects as normal when working arpund the animals but added a new twist for a project that I am just starting focusing on the viewing structures in zoos.  I think this may be the most interesting angle I have approached it with yet so will add some of the initial test shots here when I get a chance.  Making this blog a lot more visual is high on my list of priorities at the moment so expect a slew of images to go up both in new and older posts over the coming week or so -mainly whenever the weather is rubbish and I want a break from writing my MA dissertation…

Over the past fortnight -on days when I’ve been healthy (I hate flu and am a typical man when ill and refuse to do much of anything useful…) I’ve been out and about looking around the bits of Dalian I had been foregoing in order to be able to make use of them for this project.  The most interesting I have found are the Botanical Gardens -a park in Dalian that is actually a nice, peaceful park!  If any of them come out sharp (it was getting dim out and I didn’t have the tripod) then I will add an image from the fishing area here tomorrow or the next day.  I aim to go back and shoot more here in the next few days as it has elements relevant to oth my MA work and other ongoing projects.  The most interesting and something I have not seen done quite as extensively are the areas people have cleared around trees and then added cross beams between the trees to use for exercise.  A small series of these spaces will be online shortly…  There was also the classic scenes of secluded areas being used as waste dumps which is a very typical scene wrld wide and one that always interests me so when i go back with the tripod I will make some images of this as well.  Those kind of images could be anywhere in the world and so appeal to my view that China and the rest of the world are essentially the same -spaces occupied and damaged by humans in largely identical manners.

The other location I have found but not yet had chance to shot in properly -I think it is going to require an early morning to get the light right, is the coastal road between Xinghai Square and the open area of the zoo.  I think it is called Binhai Xi Lu (West Binhai Road, see, I am learning…) and has not only a secluded empty resort just near the zoo but the road itself is worth shooting because there is ne specific corner which is perfect -complete with green and red striped tarmac and a bright blue lampost…

So these locations plus a few days to the north of the city in Jinshitan and the surrounding area and I think the project will really start to take shape.  I have been looking more and more at Mark Power’s Miyazaki work and like the idea of just travelling around and documenting what is on the main tourist trail for the chinese, seeing who the Chinese tourists experience nature in Dalian.

It’s been a while since I posted here so I thought I would mark my return  by adding a bit about what I was up to yesterday.

I went with Nick down to the zoo beause he hasn’t been there yet and is looking for more backdrops for his style portraits and I want more from there for the sub project on Leisure I am doing focusing on the zoo.  As per usual I stuck to the enclosed area as I find it more interesting -kind of a hail back to Western zoos of old.  Whilst I have yet to see dancing bears it isn’t far off…

I’ll add some images when I get them back tonight from the lab but the ‘highlights’ included witnessing a group of Russian tourists really hassling the Chimp in the cage I have photographed (see the Zoo gallery on my homepage -http://davewyatt.com) which really said a lot more about the tourists and their attitudes than anything else.  Seeing grown men jumping like monkeys and banging the screen really makes you wonder what hope our species has sometimes.  I realise that animal rights are not going to be big in a country like this but still, why do people feel that animals deserve any less dignity than people?  The more work I do on this project and the leisure project as a whole as an examination of our relationship with the environment the more I see how badly we function as part of nature.  Our desire to exploit on a massive scale seems to outweigh the many smaller initiatives to preserve the natural habitat.

I was reading through some more of the Photobook Vol II by Gerry Badger and martin Parr.  I’ll have to add the page number when I get a chance to look at the book again but for now, here is a quote that I liked becasue I feel I should be reading more literature on similar themes to those I am attempting to explore through my photography:

“The title (of John Gossage’s, ‘The Pond’), reflects ironically upon Henry David Thoreau’s back to nature classic novel, Walden (1854), and its famous pond.  As Dan Meinwald has said, ‘If Thoreau declared that living properly was an art, and that man could only live properly in nature, Gossage is declaring that man cannot live properly in nature”

Pretty much sums up my current feelings on our interaction with the environment really…

Just a quick note about how I see Neo-pictorialism defined.

Neo-pictorialists have gone a different way from the lineage of New Objectivity seen originally in August Sander’s work and more contemporally in the work of Sternfeld, Gill, Misrach, Spero and Robertson, and indeed many influenced by the New Topographic movement.   Ne-pictrialists have employed staging in the classic pictorial style but with the goal of creating a platform for moral ambiguity rather than the moral uplift of photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron.  Examples of this new style can be seen in the work of photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall

Found a quote the other day in Gery Badger and Martin Parr’s opus, ‘Photobook Vol II’ that resonates with my own outlook at the moment that referred mainly to Misrach’s works in his early, “A photographic book” and later his more famous, “Desert Cantos”:

“Misrach makes clear in his later work, far more dangerous than nature -both to the natural world and to his own species -is man” (Parr and Badger, Photobook Vol II, p.32)

“Landscape, Geography and Topographic Photography” was a paper presented by critic Liz Wells in 2006 as part of the University of Plymouth’s, “The Rural Citizen: Governance, Culture and Wellbeing in the 21st Century”.

It can be downloaded here and it suggests that the credibilty in the New Topographic approach lies within the “methodology and systematic work processes on the part of the photographer as researcher”

“Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New topographic photography” was a paper presented in 2005 by Kelly Dennis at the UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar, “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The Essay can be downloaded here and addresses Bright’s essay critically in light of the influence the new Topographics had on subsequent generations and submits that the photographers were far from withholding their comment on the landscape.