When Shen Chao-liang (沈昭良) takes a photograph it as though we are at the scene. We are in a small, wooden- slatted temple in the harbor town of Nan-Fang-Ao, in Ilan, where a family is exorcising devils from the children. The psychic stands before the altar, reciting from a piece of paper, mother sits and holds incense sticks, while the balding father tends to the children, who are clearly
bored and playing up.
The shot is taken from high in one corner and through the door of the simple building is the street, where a woman walks by with her baby clutched to her breast. It is as if we are flies on the wall, watching unobserved as the intimate rituals of daily life takes place.
Shen's series of 56 black-and-white photographs on the small fishing town were taken over six years and are currently on display at the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center. It is the award-winning photojournalist's first solo exhibition and it succeeds on three levels: as reportage about a certain place at a certain time, as an insight to people's lives, and on an aesthetic level too.
Shen's Nan-Fang-Ao is not just a picturesque harbor, the pavement is bathed in the blood of a whale shark being cut open, the plastic mac of the fisherman holding up a tuna is smeared in fish scales, the years are etched into the ladies praying.
His wide angle panorama of the town shows the sun shining over the town, surrounded by dark hills, with the Pacific and a darkening sky in the background. Some pictures offer a raw slice of life, others have a sense of grandeur.
His portraits are outstanding. Each character has his or her own personalized border, a ring of netting arcs over the man repairing nets, with his big straw hat, cigarette and large convex glasses. Clothes drying, nets and a crew surround a young fisherman, sitting on the deck.
The people are caught in
character, frozen forever in their
routines. There is the concentration of the men opening up the whale shark; and the comraderie of police officers chatting, one looking toward the camera, in control, watching, gently warning.
Shen, a senior editor at the Taipei Times' sister paper The Liberty Times, says that his photos "document" the town's present and past. Nan-Fang-Ao was originally an Aboriginal settlement, while the harbor was built by the Japanese in 1921. While there is great value in such an approach, some of the pictures are art rather than reportage.
His picture of a boat's captain at the wheel is visual poetry, as the sun splashes light in window-shaped blocks over the subject and his cabin. One patch of light frames the right eye. It is an arresting photo, partly because it is like an impossible painting.
In another shot, of a basketball court and kids playing, Shen is again above the action and has somehow caught a ball looping toward the basket as eyes follow its trajectory. The beauty of the shot is in the framing of the ball by the center circle of the court, in which many of the kids stand talking.
Shen's photographs work on many levels. They capture slices of ordinary life and raise the subjects and their surroundings to a historical, even mythical level. There's no messing around with filters and staged shots and no fuzzy concepts. The image and idea is direct and untrammeled and the vision of lives and nature, raw and unaffected, stands out, like a testament.
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