Creating a local discourse
Voices of Photography (VOP) is a must-read independent photography magazine that discusses contemporary Taiwanese photo publishing.
A repeat winner of the Ministry of Culture’s Golden Tripod Award for Best Arts and Humanities Magazine, as well as other prizes, VOP is one of very few domestic publications to examine the nature and significance of photographs from the standpoints of culture, art, history and society. Founder and editor-in-chief Lee Wei-i chooses each issue’s subject-matter by drawing on photography-related questions he personally finds intriguing, which has resulted in issues dedicated to Chang Chao-tang, Cold War imagery, and Korea.
Lee has asked many questions about photography publishing since the magazine’s 2011 launch. In a 2012 special edition on “The Taiwan Photobook,” five photographers and critics closely examined the era of Taiwanese photography books. In 2014’s “A Study of Photo Publications,” the magazine combed through photography magazines from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China seeking the pulse of their respective photographic cultures and the connections between them. In 2016’s “Photobook as Method,” the magazine invited the likes of Chang Shih-lun, Nieh Yung-chen and Gong Jow-jiun to discuss the history and cultural role of Taiwanese photography books.
Digging up such history is a major undertaking, especially in Taiwan, where information about old photographs is relatively lacking. Lee says that his team often visits libraries, painstakingly combing through historical documents to extract every relevant fact.
Lee’s greatest joy in the seven years since the magazine’s founding has been his readers’ appreciation of and response to the topics he has chosen to address. His hope is that VOP’s diverse discussions will serve as a platform for fostering discourse on Taiwanese photography. Looking back to the magazine’s founding, Lee recalls that Kuo Li-hsin suggested the use of the plural “voices” in its title to represent the clamor of public discussion and conversation—something Lee believes that Taiwanese photography sorely needs—and the goal of using the publication to dissect and interpret photographs from a variety of perspectives.
Moving forward, Lee hopes to bring the magazine’s content into the physical world, perhaps curating exhibitions for each issue’s featured artist. In the meantime, he published a collection of Kuo’s photography criticism, Manufacturing Meaning: Discourse, Power and Cultural Politics in Realist Photography, early this year, and has a collection of Chang Chao-tang’s articles coming out soon. Believing that Taiwan needs to be aware of the state of photography in nearby Southeast-Asian nations, he has a history of Southeast-Asian photography being translated, and plans to publish it next year.
Discourse is an accretive process that can’t be forced or hurried. Tsao established the Lightbox Photo Library to address the fact that information on Taiwanese photography remains scattered and disorganized. The library, which has collected more than 3,000 pieces of information to date, relies on book donations from like-minded members of the public. The independently published VOP is also fostering this discourse, and has put tremendous pressure on itself by making subscriptions available since its fourth issue. Speaking about those subscriptions, Lee says, “I see them as a ‘pinky promise’ between myself and readers. The pressure they create provides me with an incentive to keep publishing.”
Chou Ching-hui, Animal Farm.
Tsao Liang-pin’s exhibition “Becoming/Taiwanese” utilizes double-sided light boxes, non-linearity, and archival images and documents to bring ideas into the physical realm. (courtesy of Tsao Liang-pin)
Books can create visual jolts through the juxtaposition of images. (VOP magazine, issue on Kao Chung-li)
Tsao Liang-pin's Lightbox Photo Library is an important resource for information on Taiwanese photography. (photo by Jimmy Lin)
Lee Wei-i’s Voices of Photography magazine focuses on photography-related questions that interest him. (photo by Jimmy Lin)
“To me, photography is the transformation of life’s ordinary, melancholic, or perplexing moments into a kind of focal point, a silent perception of time and space.” (VOP magazine, issue on Chang Chao-tang)