What makes a “good” photo?
Chang Chao-tang says a photographic image can be considered good for its internal structure, lighting, human feeling, or uniqueness, or for its revelation of veiled information. At university, Chang mainly shot experimental images intended to convey perplexity and depression. But then, tired of revisiting the same themes again and again, he put his camera aside.
It was only after completing his military service and going to work shooting documentaries for a television network that Chang realized that he needed to begin taking photos again. He started by focusing on realistic images, but soon hit a bottleneck. He then began incorporating a few of his previous surreal concepts, shooting images that retained an element of realism but executing them with different ideas in mind. He says, “We usually use the viewfinder to lock on to what we want, but in doing so are designing the thing we have locked on to.” He therefore decided to stop looking through the viewfinder and instead rely on his own accumulated experience, a process that sometimes enables him to “accidentally” capture something very unique, dynamic, and completely outside people’s ordinary observable world.
“When I taught at Tainan National University of the Arts, I often used to stroll through the area around the Wushantou Dam taking photographs. Back then, the earth around the reservoir was cracked and split into many gullies.” Chang abandoned the typical framing of such photographs, which would have placed the fissures in the foreground and the reservoir behind, and instead rested his camera in the cracks and set his focal point at about one meter. The nearness of the focal point and the shallow depth of field created a blurring of the background and the extreme foreground, giving the photos an abstract look and a perspective like that of a groundhog that has just poked its head from a hole.
Once, while taking pictures in Penghu, he spotted a man standing on a high wall speaking down to another man on the flat ground below. There were two dogs there, as well. Chang grabbed his camera and snapped off a few quick shots just as the two men were leaving, and was surprised to find that he had captured one of the dogs, a white one, in sharp focus, while the other dog and the two men were in slightly blurred motion. He found the composition even more remarkable: the placement of the men and dogs relative to the wall was perfect, creating a great image.
Another time, he got an interesting photo of a pig lying on the ground. Intended as a sacrifice for Pas-ta’ai, the “ritual of the short people” celebrated by the Saisiyat people, the pig’s legs were bound. Chang wondered what it would be like to view it from a dog’s perspective, so he placed his camera on the ground, set the focal point at about two meters, and took several photos without looking through the viewfinder. When he developed the photos, he felt that their extremely simple, naturalistic composition imbued them with a kind of power and vitality.
As the two men and the dogs departed, the camera captured them perfectly arranged relative to the wall, creating a great image. (courtesy of Chang Chao-tang)