Awakening Through Images

Professional photographers have for the most part gone digital. Most of my colleagues these daysuse digital SLRs, but I still do things the old-fashioned way--prime lens, manual focus and exposure. Using this traditional equipment often earns me strange looks from other photographers.

I like the warmth that the classic aesthetic depicts. The messiness of human nature is portrayed in the interplay between people and their environment, and the process of shooting and developing pictures always awakens me to the spirituality in this world. When I look at these shots, even ten years after I pressed the shutter, the feeling is still overpowering.

In the digital era images have great freedom, but freedom and experimentation with tools and forms don't interest me. That's not why I am in this profession. What I am trying to do is use image and metaphor, emotion and logic, the dissociation and complexity of the individual and collective unconscious, to express the spirit of the people and the times.

Chunghua Market, Taipei, 1992.

Chunghua Market, Taipei, 1992.

Chiayi Park, 1993.

A redevelopment zone in Taichung, 1994.

A resident of Lungfatang Sanatorium, Kaohsiung, 1995.