Photography Field Trip to Ipoh
Teaching at an international school is a wonderful experience for variety of reasons not the least of which is the great sense of community. Recently, in a desire to provide my photography students with a new experience, I offered an early Sunday morning field trip to parents and students to go photograph the old part of Ipoh, here in Malaysia. It is about a 200 km drive from ISKL to the old quarter of Ipoh. We left school before 6 AM, and arrived at our destination while the light was still excellent. For the next hour and a half 22 of us wandered the streets looking for photographic opportunities. Many of the buildings are quite old, having been built nearly a century earlier. There are also many noodle shops, dim sum restaurants, and a variety of small markets. We ended up at one of the most famous dim sum restaurants, "Foh San", on Leong Sin Nam Road. For a wonderful blog about the top 10 dim sum restaurants in Ipoh, follow this link:
On this trip I chose to shoot with a Mamiya C33 twin lens reflex camera. The camera takes 120 film, and with it you can get 12 images on a roll of film. This particular camera does not have a built-in light meter, so I used a program on my iPhone 5 called "pocket light meter". This great little application uses the meter in your phone camera to emulate a traditional handheld light meter. Even better, it will take a photograph of what you are metering and save it to your camera roll with all of the metering data attached in a sidebar. It's a little strange to use such a modern piece of technology to help make such an older piece of technology work well, but it really is a great effective use of software. There is a free version of this application, and a couple in-app opportunities to spend a little more to get rid of ads or donate to the developer. Here's a link with information about the app and a link to where the app can be downloaded from the app store:
Now back to the photos of Ipoh. You can see from my contact print that I was a little bit torn between photographing architecture and photographing culture. In the end the culture won out, and I printed three images of individuals either getting ready to open their shops or preparing food. These small cafés, which often spill out onto the sidewalks, are some of the best reasons to visit southeast Asia. Sure, the food is wonderful, but these buildings and the surroundings, and the way the cooking stations and the tables are arranged are an endless source of fascination. There is a patina to everything that indicates decades of patronage. These places have history! I don't necessarily know what the specific histories are for these places, but I know that it comes through in the photographs. The food at Foh San Dim Som is really great, but a few years ago the owners either tore down the old restaurant, or relocated to a modern two-level facility. They can seat a lot of people both upstairs and down, and they're always crowded, but it doesn't have that same sense of history. Most of the places are small, and with a group of three or four you can easily find a table, but with our group of 22, we really needed the larger establishment.
Images created with the twin lens reflex camera also have the look of a certain era in photography. The square format with all of its edge detail unique to each camera, the slight amount of guesswork needed because of parallax (the difference in view through the top lens and photographing through the bottom), all place the images within a certain timeframe in the development of photography. Modern digital tools try to emulate that look and feel, but creating it with film and film cameras is quite special. For this series of three images I chose to print on Ilford multigrade portfolio paper with a pearl finish. For a non-fiber base paper it has remarkable depth of tone and is able to render shadow and highlight details with good separation.
I would classify these photos as "street photography", and my goal was to capture natural, normal looking "people scapes". This is a term several critics have used to describe my street photography. The idea is that the picture represents an entire scene not just a portrait or close-up. When Ansel Adams took his large 8 x 10 view camera off into the wilderness to photograph the great landscapes of nature, those were not intimate portraits of nature, a grandiose and majestic views. In some small way I hope that my landscapes of the urban environment show a majestic pride among the common and evoke the sentiment of composer Aaron Copeland's "fanfare for the common man." I want the viewer to find beauty in the everyday common experiences of the people around them, and I hope by photographing these scenes to separated them from the mundane and elevate them to visually uniqueness. When we take the time to notice the patterns built up around the normal work lives of regular people, those patterns sometimes contain beauty. Years of thought about efficiency and convenience make things the way they are, and the casual glance can never reveal what a single photograph captures for later study. Sometimes I almost feel desperate to capture the moment before it is lost! What a silly sentiment since all moments are lost except the few that we capture in the still frame. Yet even those are an interpretation. Once many years ago, in a conversation with late fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, he reminded me, "every one of your photos is a self-portrait". So these urban people-scapes are a portrait of me because I value their unique mix of complexity and simplicity, and I hope to dignify them through my choice to preserve their lives on film.
