Not just any photographer would turn down a National Geographic magazine assignment on the grounds of staying true to his vision, but Ko Si-chi (柯錫杰) is hardly your average lensman.
Ko is known as the renegade master of modern Taiwanese photography, an uncompromising perfectionist who has consistently pushed his own artistic limits.
Ko, who has had a prolific 40-year career, recently selected 100 of his personal favorites to be shown around the country. The retrospective exhibition is currently on display at Caves Art Center in Taichung until Nov. 7, then it moves on to the Tainan Mitsukoshi Department Store from Nov. 18-23.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF KO SI-CHI
Vibrant colors, stark contrasts, clean lines -- these are all the mark of a Ko photograph. His masterpiece is a dream-like shot of the Mediterranean called "Waiting for Venus" taken in Greece in 1979. The composition of "Waiting for Venus" is simple enough: a white villa occupies the right side of the photograph, with the brilliant blue sea and sky blending at the horizon. But what Ko managed to capture was a barely perceptible tension on the horizon, as if something -- or someone -- might emerge from the water at any second.
Ko's works are the products of an extraordinary life realized by a taste for adventure. Born in Tainan in 1929, he was educated under Japanese colonial rule and later went to Japan to study photography. The young Ko exhibited a rebellious streak: after defecting from the army in his early 20s, he was sentenced to 18 months' hard labor on top of an additional 13 months' military service. Though the price he paid for his transgression was harsh, Ko credits the year and a half he lived as a deserter as the time that helped him believe he could survive under any conditions.
After establishing himself as a well-respected photographer in Taiwan over the next decade, Ko found his irrepressible wanderlust luring him to New York City, a hotbed for artists at the time. So at the ripe old age of 38, he sold his studio and headed for Atlantic shores, where he would begin his career from scratch.
Following an initial period of near-starvation as an unknown photographer in an alien country, Ko made a name for himself. He spent the next 10 years doing commercial photography for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and House Beautiful. Though he enjoyed the stimulating creative environment New York had to offer, he found himself playing the role of the malcontent once more. "Commercial photography is always done for some specific purpose. The work I shot during that period didn't really belong to me," Ko says.
In 1979, Ko again started anew to lead what he calls "the life of a bohemian," trekking around southern Europe and northern Africa for the next seven months. He relished the unrestrained freedom he enjoyed then because "there was not a single person to influence me or tell me what to do."
These seven months began his love affair with the Sahara Desert, the subject of some of his most surreal landscape portraits. The Sahara was the place where he "found himself" spiritually and nearly died in the process (His Jeep tire got stuck in the sand. He ended up digging it out with his bare hands). Ko's best known "dye-transfer" photographs were taken during this period. His pictures of the Sahara have a fluid-like quality, appearing more like something created by a painter's brushstrokes than the snap of a camera. The valleys and peaks of the dunes are complemented by sharp shadow contrasts, underscoring the flows in the sand.
The saturated color tones Ko achieves (a close approximation of real-life color as seen by the eye) are the result of a color separation process in developing the film. This "dye transfer" technique, which was used for magazine covers prior to major advancements in computer technology, is seldom seen in other photographers' work because it is a prohibitively expensive process. However, photographs developed in this manner can last up to 500 hundred years without fading.
Ko's black and white portraits are equally stunning. In particular, his "Blind Mother," shot in Tainan in 1962, is an oddly touching work of a blind woman holding a baby to her chest. Ko explains that when he came across the woman begging in the streets, he found out she had been deserted by her husband, leaving her with three children to raise. He asked her why she didn't put the baby up for adoption. "Because holding a child in my bosom is the greatest happiness," she replied.
These days Ko splits his time between Taipei and New York with his dancer wife Jessie Fan. His next project focuses on images of Taiwan, a collaborative effort with other photographers slated to be published in 2001."
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