The introductory blurb for Taiwan Photo Museum’s (台灣攝影博物館) exhibit on Chang Tsai (張才) says that the development of photography in Taiwan can be traced through the works of this iconic photographer.
Though the show aims to “offer a different perspective on the methods used by a previous generation of photographers,” the exhibit of photographs on view here is long on content and short on context.
Divided into three sections — portraits of Aboriginals, images of bar hostesses, and Tsai’s rarely seen series on egrets — the 3-inch by 4-inch black-and-white images, many of which are in various states of deterioration, are set in frames that contain between three to 12 photos each.
But nowhere is the reason why Chang should be remembered today explained.
Chang, along with Deng Nan-guang (鄧南光) and Lee Ming-tiao (李鳴鵰) — the trio was known as the Three Musketeers (快門三劍客) — pioneered realist photography in Taiwan after World War II.
Another Vision (另一個角度), located on the museum’s first floor, focuses on Chang’s early career, which began in the mid 1930s, and briefly surveys his style of portraiture, which caught on in the 1950s.
Born in 1916 to a family of intellectuals in Taipei’s Dadaocheng (大稻埕) area, Chang spent his youth touring and performing with his elder brother, who founded the Drama Research Society (演劇研究會). That experience furnished the young Chang with firsthand knowledge of the lives of ordinary members of the public, who would later become the primary subjects in his photography.
Previous Chang exhibits emphasized his expeditions with anthropologists to remote Aboriginal villages in the 1940s and 1950s to document, for example, the Atayal (泰雅) or Tao (達悟, also known as the Yami 雅美) tribes, because his images portray indigenous rituals and traditions with sensitivity.
The photos on display here are mostly portraits. One shows an Aboriginal man in tribal dress, his strong and proud face half in shadow. Another shows a man smoking a pipe, his furled brow accentuating his intelligent eyes.
Another Vision includes examples of Chang’s portraits of young women. Known today as waipai (外拍, or outside photography), this style of photography probably found its origins in early
20th-century Japan, where photography clubs would organize outings to snap pictures of beautiful young women at picturesque locations.
The females seen in Chang’s photographs were typically bar hostesses hired for the day. Sunning themselves in bathing suits or posing in front of a seascape, these women wore fashion trends popular at that time.
Whereas the first two sections are limited to portraits, the third, Chang’s series on egrets, shows these majestic creatures in flight or perched on a thin branch, and charts their life cycle.
The Taiwan Photography Museum was instituted to raise the profile and prestige of photography as an art form worthy of aesthetic appreciation.
It is disappointing that the museum doesn’t provide captions indicating when or where the photos were taken, or, for a show that purports to provide insight into the early history of Taiwanese photography through Chang’s work, include information on the relevance of his oeuvre to the development of the art form.
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