In 1931, after the surrealist master Salvador Dali finished The Persistence of Memory, a painting in which a limp watch sags from a branch, Dali used to ask its viewers: "Three years from now, will you still remember this painting?" They would answer: "No one who has seen it will ever forget it."

A youth of no regrets

In the summer of 1962, two young men of similar tastes and temperament climbed Mt. Wuchih in Hsinchu. One of these university freshmen had a camera, and on the summit he suddenly had a flash of inspiration to combine the majesty of nature with a portrait of the liberated human body. He asked his buddy to pose nude, with his head bent and body leaning at an angle. To get the image he desired, the photographer crouched low. Through the lens he saw ridge upon ridge of mountains under the big sky, and the sun shining on the naked body at an angle that made it look-from the clear lines of its muscular upper body to its round behind-like a modern statue.

Now, some 40 years later, the model Huang Yung-sung has become the editor-in-chief of Echo magazine, and the photographer Chang Chao-tang has won a National Award for Arts. Describing the works of Chang Chao-tang's youth, the film director Chen Yao-chin echoes the words of those who once beheld Dali's masterpieces: "No one who has seen them will ever forget them."

On another afternoon in the 1960s, Chang stood on a balcony alone, casting a shadow on the short wall in front of him with the sun to his back. Chang found a position where the shadow he cast appeared headless due to the shortness of the wall. As a result, the vague shapes of distant mountains make up the upper portion of his shadow body. The effect is dreamlike, surreal, and poetic.

Recalling the bold experiments of his youth, the nearly 60-year-old Chang earnestly explains: "It is fortunate that I took those photos then. Now it would be impossible for me to feel that innocent and adventurous." Chang feels that older people's work may seem quiet and serene, but it often looks clumsy as a result of excessive thinking and talking. "If I could possess the wisdom of old age and the originality of youth, such that the relationship between the two would sometimes produce musical harmony and sometimes the sparks of conflict, that would be ideal," says Chang.

The age of emptiness

Chang Chao-tang was born to a family of doctors in Panchiao, Taipei County. A smart kid, he was granted admission to Taipei's prestigious Cheng Kung Senior High School based on his outstanding academic record alone, so that he didn't need to take the joint entrance exam. While his junior-high classmates crammed for the exam, he borrowed a camera from his older brother to pass the time and ended up getting hooked. During high school, the school's military instructors often punished him for letting his hair grow too long by making him stand in front of the mirror at the school's entrance. Although rebellious, he made outstanding marks that earned him entry to the National Taiwan University's Civil Engineering Department without having to take the joint entrance exam for universities.

During the 1960s, a barren cultural period in Taiwan, Chang spent most of his university days in the library perusing masterpieces of modernism: novels by Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, theater-of-the-absurd plays by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, and surrealistic paintings. "These got tangled together in my mind and naturally emerged in my photographs," Chang recalls. Chang particularly connected with theater of the absurd, where ordinary people going about their daily lives behave weirdly, sometimes in an almost slapstick fashion. The plays took as central themes life's insipidness and emptiness and people's ignorance and boredom.

And so he often placed his classmates against barren backgrounds for photographs. He sometimes painted half of a model's face white or had him lie on a rock with a plastic bag over his head and a black cape over his shoulders. Chang tried to make his subjects look alienated and isolated, as if life had given up on them.

These works reflected Chang's innocence and curiosity. "Mr. Chang Chao-tang is a pioneering photographer who has put concepts from literature, theater, and poetry into his photographs, giving them a modern look." Those works he produced forty years ago were noted by the awards committee and are still talked about by people in cultural circles.

Before he performed his military service, the 22-year-old Chang Chao-tang held a joint exhibition with Cheng Sang-hsi, an older photographer, in a restaurant on Po-ai Road in Taipei. At the time, there were really only two styles of photography in Taiwan: beautified salon photography and traditional realism. The unprecedented nature of Chang's work caused quite a stir. Other photographers criticized it as decadent, passive, and ghostly stiff and pale. Yet painters and modernist writers had high praise for the young man.

The Poet Lo Fu said: "Through his camera's lens, Chang's tragic spirit hits our hearts with a sharp, direct blow, which at first makes us tremble, then moves us, and finally pushes us into a meditative silence. His works are more philosophical than artistic, what one might describe as art that makes people think."

My images, my songs

After graduating from college, he was in and out of the army. Then, having learned early in life to use a 16mm camera, Chang Chao-tang got a job at the recently established China Television Company. At a time when the "native soil" literary and cultural movement was just gaining steam, many painters and photographers were focusing on the stereotypically down-home images of dilapidated houses and old earthenware pots. Chang and his camera, on the other hand, followed the lives of ordinary people. He shot innovative documentaries, such as Too Beautiful for Words, 60 Minutes, and A Journey of Impressions. "Through his TV programs, I saw Chen Ta and Hung Tung, and I was blown away," says Lin Hwai-min. "I think that those programs were enlightening for a lot of people."

Every shot in A Journey of Impressions is like an individual photograph. The camera work has great feeling, and in concert with the relaxing and rhythmic musical soundtrack, it brought the documentary happily into the realm of reportage. The show also broke new ground for social-education programming by selling all of its commercial slots.

"Back then I taped every episode," said Chen Yu-hsing, a teaching assistant at the Graduate Institute of Sound and Image Studies in Documentary at the Tainan National College of the Arts. Chen points out that especially for the episode "Ceremony of Burning the Prince's Boat," Chang totally discarded traditional narration for folk custom documentaries and instead simply matched a film of the 20-minute ceremony with a piece of modern Chinese music. The images followed the music and directly conveyed the mystery of Taiwanese folk religion. The segment once again demonstrated Chang's unique and subjective style.

Many cutting-edge movie directors liked the way Chang had filmed those television programs, and during the 1970s and the 1980s they invited Chang to work as a cinematographer. His film credits include: Woman of Wrath, The Last Train to Tamshui and A Tang Dynasty Man.

Whether shooting for television or film, he was accustomed to bringing a camera with him to take stills. Whether in the countryside or in a city's back alleys, he was apt to forget about his assigned task and instead take photographs of what he stumbled upon: a couple of Taiwanese opera performers gazing upon each other amorously backstage, a child eating a cookie on Mt. Ali, a group of men resting by the Sanhsia river.... The images he caught of extras when they weren't being filmed conveyed a kind of surrealism wherein things seemed both true to life and fake at the same time.

"I am drawn to contemplative photography, where I can be myself and be free, where I needn't satisfy others or accomplish a mission but instead just relieve my own feelings of emptiness," says Chang Chao-tang. His approach toward photography has always been more creative than documentary.

Apart from its many huge photos, Chang's home is also notable for his collection of music, for he regards music as essential for life. He owns thousands of tapes and CDs, which range from folk and rock 'n' roll to jazz and classical. For Chang Chao-tang, who isn't given to talk much about his work, music is a way to understand the images he captures.

In fine-arts circles, Chang is famous for his knowledge of and sensitivity to music. He can always quickly come up with music to accompany a piece of dance or a TV program that no one else would consider. "He is like my artistic consultant. If I didn't know Chao-tang, these performances wouldn't exist," said Lin Hwai-min, who often sends Chang S O S signals. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre's Portrait of the Families, My Nostalgia, My songs, And Nine Songs all included pieces of music suggested by Chang Chao-tang.

"I like the kind of jazz that's not too loud, where the crooning conveys a look back on life's vicissitudes; or very simple music, including jazz and folk music, that gives one a taste of both what is sweet and what has been lost," Chang says.

Chang Chao-tang was also a topnotch talent scout. Back when the music industry was looking only for voices of saccharine perfection, Chang went against the grain and discovered Tsai Chen-nan, whose unique voice gives people a sense of depth of experience. No one who saw Cloud Gate's My Nostalgia, My Songs was not blown away by Tsai Chen-nan's heartfelt cries. And when Chang was in charge of the photography for the TV programs Too Beautiful for Words and A Journey of Impressions, he also selected their musical soundtracks.

Coincidence

As a photographer, Chang has always been a dabbler and has never thrown himself into one kind of subject matter. Taking photos is often something that he does while doing other work.

"I've never had a plan for my life, and the same goes for my photography," says Chang, who describes himself as very lazy. "Everything that I do just comes naturally. I go for whatever is there right in front of me and follow the whims of my heart."

He takes photographs when he feels like it and without preconceived themes. "If I maintain some kind of inner attitude, after a while it will come out in my photographs," says Chang, who has selected the works for his several photo exhibitions just by sorting through his photographs and letting the themes emerge naturally. "If I always followed a set of preconceived concepts with the ideas preceding the images, the energy and excitement would be diminished," he says. "The best stuff is usually the result of sudden inspiration or coincidence. Of course, you should still try to challenge yourself in your daily life."

"The way he treats images looks spontaneous but not at all careless," says photographer Kuan Hsiao-jung, whose photographic style is totally different from Chang's. "I think that coming from a well-off family has made him extremely secure and carefree. It's a characteristic both of his personality and his work."

The natural and the simple

During the 1980s, there was a period when Chang Chao-tang used a 200 wide-angle lens to take a lot of close-ups of old people. "Spurred on by curiosity, I discovered that when you got very close to someone you not only got close to their outer appearance but to their inner spirit as well." Some of these photos were later compiled for his exhibition Tolerance and Grace. Chang suggests that photographers today overuse wide-angle lenses. Rather than using them to convey content, they end up just making their subject distorted and ugly.

Going back to the basics, these days Chang mostly uses a standard lens. Not impressed by today's computerized imaging processes, which are becoming more advanced all the time and can do almost anything, Chang insists that "natural is still best." No matter the lighting situation, Chang always refuses to use flashes, because he believes that flashes not only disturb the object being photographed but also change the atmosphere.

In his faculty apartment at Tainan National College of Arts, there hangs a picture he took of a little girl in a military dependent's village. The girl is wearing a simple white dress and her eyes are staring at the camera. It is Chang's favorite photo. One day, he discovered that its negative was a bit wet, and he ended up scratching it when he attempted to dry it. At first this frustrated him, but later he discovered that the scratches gave the photos a sense of history. After making this "accidental masterpiece," most people who work with images would have excitedly continued to experiment and create a series of works based on this accidental discovery. But Chang thought: "An accident is an accident, but when you intentionally damage a photo it becomes unnatural. By attempting to be clever, you'd end up blundering."

Give and take

At the end of the 1980s, Chang began traveling around the island to visit long-forgotten photographers of earlier eras or their offspring. He also began compiling photographs for books about contemporary photographers and the history of photography in Taiwan. "I think that there are few Taiwanese photographers who haven't been influenced by him, and he's written a lot that will continue to influence later generations," says Ho Ching-tai, a middle-aged photographer.

Chang, now head of the Graduate Institute of Sound and Image Studies in Documentary at Tainan National College of the Arts, spends most of his time teaching in Tainan or serving as producer or executive producer of documentaries, such as Faces of the Century and Echoes of Taiwan.

In Tainan, Chang starts his morning exercise a little after 5 a.m. by walking around the Wushantou dam near the school. He often stops to sit and chat with old people fishing by the dam. Considered a man of few words by people in the arts and literary communities, Chang can easily talk to regular folks about anything. "I learned how to do that by taking pictures," he explains.

People have always been the only subject of Chang's work. He believes that if he first chats with his subject so that they get to know each other, he can create a good atmosphere for taking a photo so that the photo serves to record a segment of the subject's life and becomes a kind of "salute." On the contrary, if a photographer didn't inform the subject but instead took and published a photo without the subject's consent, then that would be a kind of "plunder."

"The photographer and the subject must have a kind of mutual understanding, some sort of meaningful sense of connection that will attract people," says Chang, who has been taking fewer photos in recent years. He reckons that modern life, so busy and crowded, has drained people of their individual original characters. People's faces don't seem as expressive as they used to.

A callow and frivolous youth got close to the life of the common people through his camera, quietly gaining character as he clicked away. In the faces of those old people who were confident and not at all camera shy, we see tolerance and substance. Today, even when not taking photos, Chang enjoys chatting with old people. "When we talk a bit, get to understand each other, and exchange parts of our lives, I feel good all day!" Chang Chao-tang has allowed us to see not only many moving moments, but also his own sincerity and warmth.

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(photo by Jimmy Lin)

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When Chang Chao-tang had just entered National Taiwan University, he took this shot of his good friend Huang Yung-sung. Treating its subject like a modern sculpture in nature, the photograph has become a classic. (1962, Mt. Wuchi, Hsinchu)

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When Chang Chao-tang used a wide-angle lens, instead of distorting his subjects, he would express their inner spirit. (1970, Auntie Chen Liao-chuan)

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Without a life plan or preconceived themes for his photographs, Chang Chao-tang and his art both revel in spontaneity. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

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Life is but a dream, life is but a play. These glances between Taiwanese opera performers off stage convey ample meaning. (1974, Keelung)

Without a life plan or preconceived themes for his photographs, Chang Chao-tang and his art both revel in spontaneity.