What makes photography so special is its ability to capture a momentary concentration of emotion through the manipulation of lighting, composition, and texture. When these elements are combined adeptly and effectively, a picture is created that puts the other expressive arts to shameful silence.
As an example of the successful use of texture in photography, consider "Leisurely Chat." How many words would a writer need, what brush strokes would a painter use, to create a similar atmosphere? The picture seems to explain itself. Starting out with plain reality, it expands to convey a mental state, a realm of fantastic possibility, and a special visual power.
Huang Tung-k'un was born in Tainan in 1927. At the age of fifteen he entered the Taipower Training Center, where he received vocational training. One year after joining the Tainan Power Company he was sent to Southeast Asia by the Japanese to serve as a driver in the military. After the Japanese surrender he was imprisoned for a year in Indonesia with other captured soldiers, before returning to Taiwan in 1946.
The same year he rejoined Tainan Power, where he remained for 26 years, until his retirement in 1972. It was not until he was 35, when he came to know Ch'en Hsien-ch'uan, a coworker, that he began to engage seriously in photography.
Huang believes that the primary purpose of photography is to capture "beauty," but that if beauty is all that is sought then photography is liable to fall into superficial and lifeless aestheticism. The root of art is beauty, but beauty has many levels: besides beauty, a piece of art must possess character, style, thought, and composition.
As a result, after an initial period of learning the basics, Huang set out on a road of his own, choosing the grainy method of expression. He disliked the repetitive imitation of the salon, he stresses, nor did he wish merely to play games in the darkroom. Technique is not the most important element. Rather, Huang's goal in using this method has been to add another level of visual interest of reality by making fuller use of photography's essence and variables.
"Goatherd Girl" and "Riverside Scene" were both taken with Fuji film that was then developed for 36 minutes in a 1:4 concentration of D-76 developing fluid at 38℃.
In the scene of a goatherd girl driving home a flock of goats Huang has created a highly artistic tone. The picture's grainy effect and the fact that it was taken into the light cause the trees in the background to look as though they were covered with snow and the interlaced branches and leaves to look like lines in a sketch or an engraving. The snow-white goats seem almost three-dimensional, adding greater interest to the scene.
Again in "Riverside Scene" the rich series of lines combined with appropriately matched figures and scene creates a rhythm of motion. The use of graininess and high resolution seems to concentrate the moment and to lift its nostalgic feelings from the plane of ordinary reality and place them deep in the mind's core. It seems to possess a primitive narrative power like a black-and-white print from an engraving.
The figures that appear in "A Man and a Net," "Seen on a Mountain Road," and "Leisurely Chat," set off against the grainy atmosphere of pictures taken into the light, all exude a discrete individual existence. Under Huang's lens, the proportion of the figures is just right, as are their postures and positions, a fact which fully expresses the photographer's powers of observation.
"A Flock of Ducks" and "A Herd of Goats" possess a rich melody that sings of longing for the countryside, while the goatherds and the man driving the ducks, like the fisherman with the net, seem to be following a fateful rhythm in their lives.
At the crossroads of photography and music, Huang advances to his own beat. A retrospective exhibition to mark his sixtieth year was held last year, in which seventy of his black-and-white works were shown around the island. The exhibition he hopes, was both a farewell and a starting point: a farewell to the subjects and style of the past and a starting point of a fresh beginning.
The important thing in photography, he says, is constant breakthroughs and creation. Without abandoning the method of graininess and high resolution, he hopes in the future to seek different subjects--perhaps portraits, perhaps scenic sketches--and apply what he has learned in the past to the creation of new works of art.
[Picture Caption]
Huang Tung-k'un at age 34,1961.
Leisurely Chat, 1965.
Goatherd Girl, 1966.
Riverside Scene, 1969.
Seen on a Mountain Road, 1967.
A Man and a Net, 1968.
A Herd of Goats, 1968.
A Flock of Ducks, 1963.
Kind and Gentle People, 1971.
Seen on a Mountain Road, 1967.
Kind and Gentle People, 1971.
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