The China Project

267 WILLIAM YANG: LIFE LINES And have you found as you are writing that you find your own voice? They have to be very brief. It’s like a haiku. Yes, they are like poems, and I do think about them a lot actually. Usually I find there is one best way of saying something. It has to do with the order of the information presented and it’s always the shortest statement. It takes time and spoken repetition to arrive at this. Because photographs are a mechanical thing, when I write on a photograph, that gives it my personal imprint, that identifies it as one of my photographs. Over the three decades or so you’ve been taking photographs, your style has been remarkably consistent, although there have been some shifts in the way you present your work or in terms of subject matter. Are there other shifts that you can register over time, and have you thought about moving into other styles of photography? I have thought about moving into other styles of photography, into photomedia for example. I’ve got a toe in that door, but not to the extent of manipulating and creating new images. I spent two or three years shooting video in preference to doing still photographs, because it’s difficult to do both. I did a lot of video work, but in the end it was too difficult — it’s not a medium that one person can do easily. I never mastered sound; the soundtracks were all horrible. I shoot very little video now. The other thing about video is that in some ways it is compared with movies, and that was a bit out of my league. You’ve got to devote your whole life to it. So I thought I would just stick to still photography because I have made it work for me, and it’s compatible with my archive of photographs that goes back 30 years. Part of it is formatting. Once I had that full-frontal format, I could fit things into it — even now I do take that full-frontal face, because it is congruent with all my other ones. I feel that way about documentary photography; I just keep making the document of my life really. It’s become more and more like a blog. But it’s true I’ve changed my presentation. For example, I print big now; I never used to. When I first started out, people would look closely at a 10 x 8” and get a lot out of it, but now, if you presented a 10 x 8” in a gallery, people would hardly look at it. I think that’s a shame, because the information is all there if you care to look. But it’s fashionable to be big now. I’ve printed big to be competitive! I’ve made my documentary photography work in my performance pieces because I’ve been doing them for almost 20 years now, and people still want them. I’ve toured most of them overseas. I’d love for them to be films rather than performance pieces, but it’s too expensive. I like marginalised subjects, which is really my life, my position in society, and this means I can’t really be mass popular. That’s probably been the lesson I’ve had to learn in my work. How do you think about your photographs when you look back? They are so personal — as you change as a person or grow or get older, how do you see them now? My most recent performance piece, My Generation , is really a retelling of the photographs that I put in my book Sydney Diary in 1984. Because I’ve got the stock of photographs, I can always go back to my library of pictures and pull out different stories. In some ways photographs are like memory, that’s one of their principal values because I’ve forgotten a lot. You see different things 20 years on; I could almost say that a photograph isn’t any good until it’s 20 years old. A photograph captures a moment in time and because it’s the nature of the world to change and move on, these moments can never return again. It is a good thing to keep in the back of my mind as I’m taking photographs, that it is very time specific. Although you don’t realise it at the time, people change and you are only young once. These are clichés, but they are very true to photographs. When I look back at those photographs, in fact, I wish I was a better photographer in the ’70s, because I just didn’t know much about photography. I don’t mean in a technical way, but I often wish that I’d stood back and photographed the room, which I didn’t do. And I’d have taken more photographs. For example, with the gay movement, I wish I’d taken more, but the fact is, very few photographs were taken in the ’70s, so I’m just lucky to have what I’ve got. Now everything is recorded, everyone’s got their Facebook profiles, and their lives are documented — well, they are over-documented. The times have changed. Russell Storer was in conversation with William Yang on 13 January 2009. endnotes 1 William Yang, in William Yang: Australian Chinese [exhibition catalogue], National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2001, p.27. 2 Dissolve pieces are often presented as projections with slides, in which one image is faded out while the next is faded in, overlapping the two images during the process. 3 The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is an annual parade and festival that has been held since 1978, advocating gay and lesbian rights and celebrating community. 4 Pauline Hanson (b.1954) is an Australian politician and the former leader of the One Nation party. Her first speech on election to Parliament in 1996 included statements against Asian immigration that generated widespread community and media debate. 5 Lisette Model (1901–83) was an Austrian–American photographer and teacher. 6 William Yang, in William Yang: Diaries: A Retrospective Exhibition [exhibition catalogue], State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p.16. above Madam Lash’s rack party #2 1977 Digital print / 45 x 30cm / Collection: The artist opposite William at Thornborough, 2006 (from ‘GoMA self-portrait’ series) 2008 Digital print, ed. 1/20 / 49 x 60cm / Collection: The artist