Behind the Simplicity of a Gesture – Photography in Asia

 

Who knows how many times we've seen the Victory Sign done with the hand, and I'm the first to appreciate doing it in practically every shot of myself. An innocent gesture that I learned from Asian youngsters that have now evolved into something spontaneous and immediate.

Then, if someone asks why I do it, I'm not sure what to say: I just like it, it brings me joy, and it reminds me of selfies with children in Indonesian villages or Chinese ones in Rome; additionally, you don't always know where to put your hands when you're photographed.

We are bombarded with subtle gestures or statements in our daily lives.

This then is really minimal and innocent.

 

It took a massive volume just bought to give it meaning.

And what a meaning!

The book is titled “Photographies East – The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia” edited by Rosalind C. Morris for the Duke University Press of London, released in 2009, and collects some essays by anthropologists on the presence and meaning of the act photography in Asia, since its origins, ranging between China, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Thailand.

It is not the first book I have on this topic, I have already mentioned previously the other volume dedicated to the history of photography in Asia by Zhuang Wubin.

What these narratives have in common is the premise of the impact that photography has had on various societies in Asian countries.

Any study of this type always starts from the role of photography as one of the tools of European and colonialist aggression: from its earliest days, it has been the “sign of the foreign” and – as such – one of the many types of equipment of the colonizing arsenal with which Westerners have dominated in Asia.

However, it should be specified that it's not a discourse that is reduced to the classic dichotomous distinction between East and West, or between technological modernity and organic primitivity, but the question is much more complex and goes deep into photography itself; proof of this is that the skepticism – to the point of actual terror – of the Asian populations was not aimed only at the white colonizer holding the camera but at the tool itself, given that the same fear and skepticism were also directed towards the first photographers Chinese.

In reality, the appearance of the photographic act brought with it very symbolic and impacting themes, such as the intimate relationship between photography and death; or between photography and violence; the perception of the occult power inherent in technology; or the link it has with the practices of political domination and suppression.

I remember, by the way, that most of the time the first photographs taken in the East depicted the powerful kings of the Thai or Chinese dynasties, or that it was precisely those sovereigns who were the first to own the photographic equipment and dabble in that art, as happened in Malaysia.

This is an absolutely fascinating subject that I am spending a lot of time on and will come back to for sure in the future.

Although, more than by the historical digression, this time I was fascinated by the anthropological and philosophical reading of these essays collected in the book.

Anyone who has been reading me for some time knows how important philosophical reflection on the act of photographing is for me. All the more so if all this is related to Asia.

Because what emerges overwhelmingly from the different theses of this book is that Western colonialism has not brought with it only the mechanical means of the camera but has also imposed its different visions inherent in time, space, or large categories such as life and death.

The idea of strangeness contained in the discourse of photography has as its corollary the conception of the camera as the origin of a fissure, which marks the separation between two very different orientations of time: “It opens between an orientation to the past as that which is cut off from its own future, and an orientation to the future as the ideal form of the past”. (Rosalind C. Morris).

These two different directions of time have inscribed in themselves mourning on the one hand and melancholy on the other. All this happens thanks to the camera that is placed in the middle of the time flow.

 

Obviously, this discourse is not related only to Asia but is always valid when discussing the philosophical value of the photographic act, from Barthes to Sontag: taking a photograph drags with it the conflict between two different temporal modalities and continually renews the drama of simultaneous disappearance and persistence.

The people portrayed in the photographs we take every day, unconsciously, always become visible signs of an absence which however persists over time, unlike our lives planted in finite reality.

The problem arises when these philosophical and cultural systems collide with Asian ones that are radically different from ours.

Concepts such as time, the past, death, the soul vary from country to country, from village to city.

Taking them for granted is a huge mistake; but this is part of the presumption of “ideological colonialism” which prompts us to think that in every part of the world we go, everyone must share our ideas and our value systems.

 

Unknown photographer

An example is an interesting analysis made by Nickola Pazderic in his chapter entitled “Mysterious Photographs”, in which he analyzes the strange phenomenon of “mysterious photos”, lingyi zhaopian, which became popular in the 1990s in Taiwan.

This phenomenon is associated with what the English called “spirit photographs” or “ghost photos” in the 1800s.

The nineties were for Taiwan the transition point between a past marked by martial law established in 1949 with the arrival of the Nationalist Party (KMT), remembered with fear as the baise kongbu (white terror) under the tyranny of President Chiang Ching-Kuo, which included the execution of 4,000 people, 8,000 imprisoned and over 20,000 persecuted. It was the period in which the president maintained his authoritarian and criminal regime in the name of unity with China until the liberation from this dictatorial climate with the return of the United Nations in the late nineties and the proclamation of the identity of the island as Taiwan.

What followed were the years of economic boom, democracy, and the recognition of the island among the thirty major economic and commercial powers in the world.

The late 1980s, thanks to the power of economic development, infused new energies and dreams of consumerism and imitation of the dominant Western models.

 

It is not easy to summarize the long analysis of this article.

The author establishes a strong link between these strange and uncanny photographs that often reported the presence of ghosts imprinted in the negatives of the photographs and the incredible success that wedding photography had, i.e. pre-wedding or wedding photographs, which no couple could escape and which made hundreds of special photographic studio flourish.

Photography as a necessary form for the “indefinite perpetuation of the memory of the appearance of social relations.”

On the one hand, there is the need, impossible to decline in order to be socially accepted, to appear in the photographs, on the other hand, there are the atavistic fears linked to everything that revolves around the camera and the act of shooting.

Although it never comes to be an explicit admission, Taiwanese photography continues to have a mysterious and occult power.

©Masatoshi Naito

The anthropologist has recorded the common opinion among people that the camera has the ability to capture energy fields at low frequencies produced by both individuals and spirits (as evidenced by “ghost photographs”).

Here we get to the heart of this topic and the fascinating part of it for me.

For Taiwanese society, spontaneous photography, what we call “street” photography, is the one that arouses the most dismay and is judged negatively. Stealing a photo of a woman who is shopping, walking, or talking unconsciously is considered “to steal shots” (toupai), the use of which is that for the pure pleasure of those others.

Ironically, in the perception of Taiwanese society, the awareness of being constantly filmed by video surveillance cameras, even inside women's toilets, is more tolerable than being photographed unconsciously.

Here I report this splendid metaphor which is however perceived as real in the Taiwanese conception (and not only), which helps to understand this strangeness well.

“It should be noted that spirits of disorder and loss would remain invisible to most eyes were it not for the camera. The device, however, is also marked by science and mystery because it captures energy patterns and because its lens is conceived as yang (intrusive, ordering, and male) while its negatives (fumian) are deemed yin (receptive, disordering, and female). What is more, the phenomenological referents of black holes, time tunnels, and spirit fields also share much in common with the ambivalent ontology of the camera insofar as these signified theoretically hold the universe together while threatening to suck the life out of it.” (N. Pazderic)

This perception of the camera helps to better understand that fear of being photographed rather than being filmed by cameras.

As an elderly Taiwanese told the anthropologist, when he was still a boy in the village, it was a common opinion among the country bumpkins (tubaozi), as he calls them, that he absolutely had to avoid being photographed because the camera, with its flash, would have captured the essence of the people portrayed, and that the films inside the room, once pulled out, would have brought those souls with them.

Christian Metz writes it very well in his article “Photography and Fetish” (1990): “The snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time – unlike cinema, which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding of time similar to that of life.”

©Masatoshi Naito

Here then emerge the various forms of resistance to this danger, of subtraction from the violence of photography.

I have read, for example, that it is also an abiding Taiwanese belief – as I had already heard it said in Indonesia, especially from women – that, given the occult power of photography, three people should never pose in a single photo, since the imbalance of the order of yin and yang would make the life of the subject in the center shorter. Or that it is customary to huddle close when photographed for fear of being left out of the group of people.

And, last but not least, returning to our starting point, it is customary to make the “V” sign of victory with the fingers of the hand precisely to vanquish the aggressive gaze of the camera. All of this is obviously experienced with fun and excitement, but precisely because this occult power of the lens is being resisted and exorcised.

 

It's amazing how certain innocent attitudes can hide such thick plots of fears, superstitions and beliefs.

That this gesture then became common in every part of the world and social class is undeniable, just as it is certain that it has severed for many people that link to its initial meaning.

But that idea of the camera as the mirror of yin and yang, with its masculine ordering power projected outwards and the feminine receptive and carrier of disorder within the negative that sucks the life and spits it out, with souls, like a black hole, I think are among the strongest I've ever read.

Well, this is what I meant at the beginning, which is the “colonial” habit of ignoring the profound differences that separate us, which are not just those of language or religion.

The simple handling of a camera for those who saw it for the first time and understood how it worked unleashed a myriad of fears of which there is still a trace in these amusing and naive attitudes.

 

This is a topic on which, of course, I will return to write.

For now, I'll stop here and I hope it helped you think once again about the power tied to a finger pressing a button.

As well as that of two fingers in a V pointing towards the lens.

Indonesia 2016\2017

“Photographies East – The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia”, edited by Rosalind C. Morris (Duke University Press, 2009)

Italian version