It's a principle of life that old things get thrown away, but if you hold on to them they begin to acquire the value of antiques. This applies particularly to photos. Few things are less interesting than last year's snapshots, but those old sepia prints are part of the historical record.
What, you might think, could be more appropriate to Double Ten National Day than this collection of photographs covering Taiwan's history from 1945 to the present, put together by the government's official Central News Agency (CNA)? They range from rice harvesting in Ilan to street protests in Taipei, and are in black-and-white up to the late 1980s and in color thereafter. Some of them are well-known and have been frequently reproduced, such as those dating from 1979 of the "Formosa Incident" detainees -- Annette Lu, Shih Ming-teh, Chang Chun-hung, Huang Hsin-chieh, Chen Chu, Yao Chia-wen and Lin Hung-hsuan in court surrounded by military and police personnel.
These law-enforcement agents cannot have had much idea of the significance of those proceedings. They no doubt assumed the accused were simply "wrong-doers," rather than national heroes in the making. And indeed this book's main strength is that it demonstrates what can't be demonstrated too often, that what appears as reality in one era is revealed as something quite different after the passage of the years. This is the reason why the older photos here are invariably more interesting than the more recent ones.
"Is that really Ximending?" we exclaim. "How it's changed!" We forget that it will change again, and what's up-to-the-minute now will in the future seem quaint and old-fashioned, and before very long at that. Just looking at the clothes is sufficient to make the wise realize that, whatever the young may think, fashion is the one thing that can be guaranteed, always and without fail, to leave you behind.
CNA is in no doubt about its public role, and the limitations that went with it in former times. In his Introduction, for example, chairman Su Tzen-ping writes, "As a news outlet, CNA has aspired to report events fairly, which is why we regret that the photographic record of the Feb. 28 Incident of 1947, and the `White Terror' that followed in the 1950s was unbalanced. This deliberate slip of memory of course had much to do with CNA's role in that authoritarian period. Therefore, we are pleased all the more that the opposition's political movement during the 1990s was faithfully recorded, as were the disturbances following the presidential election."
There are many fascinating images here. There's the first-ever Double Ten parade in 1949, the first Taipei City Council elections (in 1950); people intent on the results of the 1952 US presidential election; Elisabeth Taylor in Taipei for the Golden Horse awards in 1979, boys catching cicadas in Renai Road and Chen Shui-bian
(
Nowadays, though, people are likely to take a different view. Today, images of all kinds proliferate to such a degree that still photos, certainly from the present era, command increasingly less and less interest. It's not only that there are thousands of photos published daily in the press. Ordinary individuals, too, have no problem recording anything they care to. Just a couple of years ago people's faces would routinely light up if you pointed a camera in their direction. Not any more. Only very old photos continue to attract us, simply by virtue of the fact that what they show is so long ago it's as if it had never been.
RSS