Moon Festival

The thoughts that underpin my picture taking may sometimes be over detailed here. I hope no-one’s patience is tried! 🙂

If I can make an assumption that you like my images, or some of them, or enough of them , then perhaps you might also be interested in how or why they are as they are. Perhaps not to the detail that I may be, but it is fine to dip in and out as you please. btw, these images will enlarge when clicked on.

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There is something magical about real life photography. The reason is what I aim to shoot hasn’t happened yet. There may be only potential for a well composed scene to occur, and there is only the briefest moments to recognise this and shoot it.

Whether it will come off or not, whether it will occur, is something that is not yet known. It is still in the future – albeit the immediate future. That unknowingness is fascinating to me, a field almost of the mystic, although of the reasoned kind, if you’ll forgive the oxymoron.

 Dealing with bodies moving independantly of each other in three dimensional space (where else?  ) I can control nothing but my own recognition of the moment. I can’t will an ideal moment into existence, or even will it out of existence – it will do that all by itself, very quickly. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. 

….um, sorry, that’s the Terminator. 

Now where was I? Oh yeah – I can only see and recognise the potential for an ideal moment in the instant before it might occur. This is not quite as expert as, say, the pre-cogs in Minority Report, who predicted it hours ahead, but hey! that was Tom Cruise, and I’m just me.

But on a similar philosophical plane that the movie was aiming for, there is a dopey, low brow, faux profound, internet-style question that does the rounds. That is, “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it, does it really happen?” What a dopey proposition that is. Of course it happens. The falling tree is as much a part of reality as we are. And it falling would have consequences for the forest creatures. What they might be asking is: does it have any real meaning without human consciousness being involved. You aren’t disrespecting humanity by calling that idea hubris. You are instead expanding your respect to include everything else. 

So while in that context their idea is flawed, I’ve thought about the extent this  idea has relevance to real life photography. When out in the field I’m not an influence on real life, or try not to be. Sometimes though, my being an influence may turn it into something better than I had planned. But, apart from those occasions, the events I’m photographing are going to happen anyway. All I am making is a decision about is choosing the specific combination of that reality. I’m not hearing a tree fall in the forest and thinking, “Man, lucky I heard that, otherwise it never happened.”  I’m thinking about events unfolding in front of me in a potentially predictable way, and I’m ready to take advantage of that, and of serendipity too, if that happens. My consciousness is the decider of the resulting image, acting like a director, but of random events. That contradiction between active involvement and enforced passivity is a challenge that I find fascinating. 

My proposition therefore is that while it is real life occurring, my decision about when to shoot it is the only thing that gives it a specific meaning. A meaning that otherwise would not exist, but now will, as captured in a photograph. 

So, to conclude, the events I’m depicting might happen, but without the involvement of the photographer they would have no independant meaning.

So in these circumstances

(drum roll)

the figurative tree in the forest never does fall.

Discuss. And if you run out of paper, signal your superviser, extra sheets are available from the front desk.

With these thoughts in mind (where else?  ) I put these speculations into practice at the Moon Festival in Cabramatta.

I like all things Asian. Australia has the geographical fortune to reside in the Asian part of the world, amongst cultures that are thousands of years old. These cultures diffuse their way down to Australia by osmotic proximity, like Australia is the hot water and Asia is the tea leaves. While taking in the sights I sip at the resulting brew.

The Moon Festival is a very old one, originating in China. It is held at the time of the full moon that marks the harvest. Under the influence of China the festival spread over time to the south-east Asian countries. It is Spring in Australia, but of course the festival is held at the same time as the Autumn harvest in the Northern Hemisphere.

Cabramatta, through the refugees that fled the communist takeover, became a large Vietnamese community. To visit there is like travelling abroad without all the detail of passports and organisation. A 40 minute drive to Cabramatta is therefore like travelling a much longer way.

I took photos in the festival precinct, but also wandered into adjacent streets, where day to day life was still happening. Both aspects were of great interest to me.  

Let’s begin with two linked images from the side streets.

I was excited to encounter this hall where pocket billiards are played. The premises are atmospherically run down, as all billiard halls necessarily must be. That comes with the territory. They were as equally run down in the 1920s as they are now, a century later. There was never a time when billiards halls looked shiny and new.

The thing you may not know about pocket billiards is that it is played on a table without pockets. Don’t ask me why. Just put it into the mystery along with billiard halls that are, by default, run down.

The main challenge for me in this image is as per the body of this text, that is, having many people in it arranged in positions of precise composition without intervention by me. The better to express the atmosphere. The dozen or more people in this image are making their random choices to move where they wish, so that is a lot of potential variables put in the way of my succeeding. It is like a poker machine with a dozen! reels that you want and need to line up the right way.

This photo is of the lady owner of the billiard hall in conversation with locals. She told me she’d been running the establishment for twenty years. She is quite forthright lady, as she’d probably need to be running such a blokey place.

This photo of mahjong players had for me the same challenges as the billiard players. Actually it was even more difficult, fiendishly so in fact. There were so many variables. What I needed was something interesting happening on the majority of the tables for the photo to work best. I was interested in the way the geometry of the random arms matched the geometry of the tiles. Or if the tiles were random, so were the hands. I had to be ready to capture a moment that is literally occuring for only a fraction of a second. The subtle torture of real life photography is that the right moment may never happen, so all I could bring to this was concentration and patience. But even patience in photography doesn’t mean it will be rewarded.

The main street of the festival was so crowded – and the footpaths on each side were packed too. I mention the lack of people from other parts of Sydney in attendance, but perhaps there may not have been enough room for them!

The food stalls were jumping with activity. They were so packed, some had a line of staff on the crowd side of the counter relaying orders and passing food to the bustling crowd. The whole situation was energetic, and noisy too, and good humoured. I saw two arms here rising like waving cobras pointing to what they wanted, and captured that moment. I was amazed to see later that out of the thousands of people in the street (and of the very occasional photographic choices I was making) a girl in this photo also appears prominently in a later picture (the lunch girls.)

Lunch girls. One of them, as mentioned, was in my food frenzy shot taken some time before. Did she balance all those trays of food and drinks back from the food stalls to her waiting friends? She deserves a badge for that. After I  took this natural shot Minh (on the left) asked me if I wanted to take a version where they were all looking at the camera, but I said unposed is better.

This harried father was trying to push his double pram against a relentless contra-flow of people. He was  managing some little progress, slowly clearing a path through it like a victa mower through long grass.

Another rushed dad, his arms full while being pulled along by his little girl in the lemon dress.

Given the tremendous foot traffic, I didn’t think I’d get an unobstucted photo of these girls taking time out while sitting comfortably on their haunches. (I never could manage to do that.) But a rare break in the foot traffic of a few moments allowed me to.

Kids at a stall.

Waiting in the wings for their cue to perform.

Here are some images from the side streets, where usual life was still going on. They are taken sequentially. This meat shop was really glowing in the light of red lamps.

A few steps later I took this photo.  Scarf. It’s a moment of real life / of clothes fashion.

Balloon boy.

I think this photo seems to suggest a story happening beyond the scene, like a tableau. The girl has a retro Saigon look.

The owners of the video shop are almost lost amongst their mountains of stock.

Faces in the moment.

More on that theme. In this instance they are watching a one-handed prawn peeling competition. A challenge I’ll never take up. Using a lens at 28mm, I really am very close to these people, not much more than a couple of feet away from the nearest. And obviously when taking the image I’m facing the ‘wrong’ way to where these people no doubt believe the real action is happening. They would be thinking “there is no reason for him to be facing in my direction. The stage is where it is all happening, so why is he facing me, it doesn’t make sense.” 

I agree. The chances of their encountering a photojournalist, or more pertinently, becoming the subject of one, are really quite vanishingly small. Eg. I’ve never been the subject of one in the street and I doubt anyone reading this has either. I mean, even if you dogged the tracks of, say, David Alan Harvey in the hope of being photographed, there is still no guarantee you’d get into a scene he’d think worthy of taking. The possibility that I might be a photojournalist, or at least a culturally oriented one, blessedly far from hard core style things, therefore wouldn’t have occurred to them, and so taking a picture of them would have seemed inexplicable. In their humility they don’t realise that their faces are, actually, quite interesting. They didn’t know that I was more interested in real moments than I was in the stage performance they were watching. The action on stage however let me photograph them largely without influencing them.

Sometimes being an influence can work in my favour. In this instance for example, the guy on the left was photographing the stage, but when he spotted me raising my camera he used his phone to screen his face. But a desperate curiosity about me remained with him. He wanted to gain more data about me and, in fact, the  whole weird situation. So he left one eye out and it continued to monitor me, seeking further data. In his single eye I see some amusement flavouring his curiosity. Which kind of defeats his purpose of trying to maintain a psychological anonymity I think!

That’s because people, knowing they are being photographed (in, say, a social situation) in lieu of a real face prefer to present a graven image to the world. This usually takes the form of a fixed, rictus, grinning mask. (Ok, I know fixed and rictus mean the same thing, but…I like tautologies.)  This is the self-conception people find acceptable to present as a public image. I do this. You do it. We need a David Alan Harvey or Steve McCurry (who also do it btw) in our lives to rid ourselves of this practice of presenting fixed, grinning masks to the world. But such photojournalistic types are, as I say, exceptionally thin on the ground. So they can’t be relied on. But we still need them to demonstrate the possibility of another way of being depicted beyond our limited self-conceptions that we might be comfortable with others seeing, but are still privately bored by, as the viewer is.

In real life, the face, the wonderfully varied face, runs through a myriad of expressions reflecting their inner life at any particular moment, or how they are responding to the outer world at any particular moment. Still photography is the only medium that captures this quality best of all.

Their captured appearance isn’t always what you might call ‘portraiture.’ In fact that overall quality is usually pretty rare. Eg. as Professori Cowper confessed:

     “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sit.”

He has even adopted the faux Latin as his family motto:

                                             I Just Sit 

But to greater or lesser degrees of insight, capturing people in their natural state is a satisfactory outcome.

And it’s not so easy to do. That’s because, as primates, we evolved in the trees. That has made vision our primary sense. We are superior at seeing things and navigating through space even at speed, as when driving. The more people in your shot therefore, the more chances their number one sense may be deployed on the photographer, and largely I try to avoid the photo including me in that off-camera way.

What appeared to be an everyday conversation was somewhat subverted by one of the voices issuing from the face of a Buddha.

A grandad demonstrating a dragon puppet.

This photo of the Vietnamese grannies is an instance however where my presence helps the photo. I have to add therefore that in photography there are no set rules. The only rule is what works. In this case it is their three different reactions to my photographing them. I’d describe those reactions as, respectively, curious enquiry, engaged warmth, and complete shyness. These ladies would have grown up in and experienced Vietnam’s many sad years of war.