Yang Chih-hsin's Taiwan is a place where rice chaff dances slowly in beams of strong, clear light. It is a place of gentle breezes, swaying rice paddies and cool, clean rivers. In Yang's Taiwan, the laughter of small children cuts through thick, lazy summer afternoons and beasts of burden trod slowly along on the red, packed earth of dusty roads.
It is also a place that, according to Yang (楊基炘), is now gone forever.
Its essence, however, has been saved. All one needs to do to see it is gaze upon the pages of Yang's book, Time Capsule (時代膠囊), a collection of photos taken in Taiwan between 1950 and 1959.
"It's my life's work, my legacy," says the 81-year old from the confines of his office in Taipei. "People can forget, they can change and re-write history, but nobody can ever change a photograph. Photos tell the truth," he says, beckoning toward the walls of his office, adorned with prints of his work.
Born in Ching Sui, a township in Taichung County, Yang's life has been anything but conventional. At the age of five Yang moved with his family to Japan where he spent the next 20 years growing up and attending school — kindergarten through university. At 25, Yang moved back to Taiwan to escape World War II. It was then that he first began taking pictures as a means of earning a living.
With English skills learned in Japan, photography training and an outgoing personality, it didn't take Yang long to hook up with part of a large contingent of US government advisors that were in Taiwan on assignment after the Pacific war ended. He was eventually hired by the US government and given the task of using his photography skills to document the American effort to help Taiwan modernize its agricultural sector. To accomplish the task he was given a car, a driver, the latest camera equipment of the day, film and was then turned loose upon Taiwan's countryside to snap away at his discretion. And that's exactly what he did, for 10 years.
"When I first started taking photos Taiwan was very isolated," Yang says. He explains that under Chiang Kai-shek's regime, the countryside of Taiwan was extremely marginalized. "Most of the people who lived in the country, the farmers, were native Taiwanese and, therefore, not a part of Chiang's society." Yang adds that, despite this handicap, Taiwan's agriculture sector flourished. "The weather and soil are good here. With help from the US, the agricultural sector did very well in a short period of time."
One of the ironies surrounding the success of Taiwan's farmers is that it was their very success that, according to Yang, led to Taiwan's mass industrialization and phasing out of the lifestyle so beautifully preserved by the photos in his book. "As the farmers became rich, they built small factories," he laments. "But it wasn't long before these little factories became big factories."
Yang believes this industrialization has been good for Taiwan. But he also firmly believes that in Taiwan's race toward industrialization, a precious way of life was left behind, forgotten. "People in the countryside used to depend on each other. They used to be like a family; they used to talk and work together. Today, it doesn't take long in Taiwan's countryside to realize that it has all changed."
One aspect of Yang's work that is immediately apparent is the humanness and intimacy of his photographs. His camera seems to engage his subjects in a way that makes the viewers feel like they are being invited into the subject's home for tea or dinner. It is also abundantly clear that during his 10 years of taking pictures of Taiwan's "agricultural development" he was actually engaging in a much larger endeavor. He was documenting the development of Taiwan's people. Put simply, these are not pictures of agricultural development, these are pictures of people. And it is through this humanness that the images are able to so strongly reflect the spiritual quality of rural life in a time when material goods and wealth were at a minimum.
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