Shanghai, China. April 2013.
Sunstruck
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Author Archives: damienpitter
Impressions: Trees by the Tracks
Between Shanghai and Beijing, China. April 2013.
| I like trees.
Apparently I am also allergic to them, but whatever. I like the way light falls between them in streaks and patches and flickering shimmers and long shadows like roads to vanishing fairy-lands. How they cut light into shafts that transect the trodden paths and the spaces between. I like how strong trees are and how tall and how even old trees somehow smell new. I like the way they reach up and down at the same time. I like the way they move, bending, swaying without losing ground. I like the way they creak. It was a tree in Texas that taught me the value of the smallest patch of shade. I like the connectedness of trees when they grow together in forests. I like their defiance when they grow by themselves. I like trees that grow, impossibly, through fences and from sheer faces of limestone and granite. These trees grew in the moments between dust patches on the journey from Shanghai to Beijing. I didn’t catch their story as we sped by, just a vertical impression, a thin stand against the speed of flight and the unsettling of dust. |
Shanghai To Beijing From The Sightseeing Car
Between Shanghai and Beijing. April 2013.
| The truth is, there’s not that much to see. We often take trains when we can as a way of seeing a cross-section of the country we’re traveling in. We booked passage on the train from Shanghai to Beijing and when we took our places, we found them at the end of the train, in a car with only four seats and big windows. The sightseeing car.
But in five and a half hours, the sights were remarkably homogenous. There were what felt like three minutes of rocky hills, and seven minutes of coastal wetlands, and the rest of the time, we sped through a dusty brown landscape of farmland only occasionally sewn with crops. But the oddest thing to my foreign eyes, was the construction. There were highrises that looked to be apartment blocks being built amid the wash of brown dust and yellow air, near no other building town or village on the flat horizon. Something about it felt like science fiction, like a premonition of Blade Runner or the ending of Mad Max where the lost children find their way home to the desolate skeleton of a once-great city.
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Confetti and Fairydust
Shanghai, China. April 2013.
| I’m not really a gearhead. I like technology; I like the things it allows me to do, but I’m not one of those people who can recite a litany of brand names and model numbers. I don’t name my gear after women or think of it as my baby. I used to be fastidious about my camera care. I’d clean it before every shoot with lens paper and fluid and a lens-pen and blower. And then I really started to travel and that’s a lot of stuff to carry around and it was always awkward to break out a cleaning routine in the middle of a temple somewhere just because I wanted to change lenses. So I stopped being so fastidious and as you might expect, my images got dirty. But what I didn’t expect was that the mistakes I’d tried so hard to avoid for so many years–—things being out of focus, things being blurred by shaky hands, lens flares from pointing into the sun, having dust and dirt on the lens–—that these things would become what I find the most interesting in my photography. I took these shots in the old town in Shanghai, near the old tea houses and the Yuyuan Gardens. It was a gorgeous day with gorgeous light, but mostly what I like about these shots is the overexposure, the lens flares and the light artifacts cast by the spots of dust on the lens. I like the texture, like confetti and fairydust. I like the feeling of squinting into the sun, the idea of something too brilliant to look at directly. |
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The Offense of Sleep
Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. July 2012.
| It’s that time of year in the life of a school where our sleep is filled with dreams of summer, that summer of cool drinks tickling the throat on hot days, that summer of south winds and stars and evenings with the live music of nearby bars spilling into the ears of quiet cafes with rich desserts and the company of friends it’s been too long since last seen, that summer of canola fields and strawberries and bookstores in a language you understand, that summer which remains painfully at the other end of the-pile-of-things-you-need-to-do, tasks that take longer with every hour of sleep stolen from the time it takes to just-get-it-done. In last year’s summer dream, we lived for a moment in a red house on a high cliff where the tall grass bent like the paint-licked bristles of a green-white brush in a chase of wind that sprinted with exigent indifference. I slipped from the house one night before bed, saying I wanted to take a couple of photographs, that I’d be back in a few minutes, knowing it would be more like half an hour. Three hours later, closer to 3am than 2, I crept back home. There’s a stillness in the middle of the night that’s magic, an openness to the world without its lid on, a sense of big that it seems an offense to be unconscious of. I took these photographs in the vacant lot next to the little red house and the skies kept moving and morphing into ever more beautiful patterns and rhythms and the moon and the stars kept shining through on the slumber of the town. A whale I couldn’t see passed near enough for me to hear it exhale and the wind wrapped everything in its urgent whispers until the gravity of exhaustion won out and dragged me home into an entirely different begrudging kind of sleep. |
Whispers in the Forbidden City, Part II
Beijing, China. April 2013.
The Ephemeral Palace
Beijing, China. April 2013.
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The Forbidden City is the Forbidden Palace and it’s massive and sprawling and made of hard things, durable things. Wood and stone. It feels like it will stand forever, like it has always been there. It feels aside from time, permanent. But then there is the warmth that these firey walls seem to long for. The emperors and servants and concubines and generals and soldiers and annoying cousins. And teachers. Inhabitants, whose once throbbing veins have spilled or dried up, who became first memories and then stories and then whispers on the tongues of tour guides and foreigners. And those tourists now, who spend a few hours but pass everywhere in moments with a giggle or a sneeze or the fractional snap of a shutter. Such passings. The palace is hollowed stone, a vessel for the ephemeral fluid of human lives. The students at the school where I work are amazing artists and amazing musicians and filmmakers. My favorite events of the year are the senior art exhibition and a concert they call Studentainment. But there’s a challenge in teaching, where your work is to nurture the creative fires of your students, that sometimes you neglect your own. We can forget that we too are artists, forget to be artists. So this last weekend, a new event was held at our school. An art exhibition of work done by the adults in our community, the teachers and administrators and parents. We are potters and painters and ceramists and quilters. And photographers. That’s me. I showed the these two photographs from Beijing along with a third, a Part II of the Whispers in the Forbidden City series I posted a couple of weeks ago. |
Sketches of the Crowd
Beijing, China. April 2013.
Whispers in the Forbidden City
Beijing, China. April 2013.
| The thing is, sometimes I need to pay better attention. Or else make notes. We took a walking seminar through the Forbidden City and our docent taught us many things; she painted such a big, rich picture of imperial China that I can hardly hold on to all of it. The details slip away. I remember that she talked about the Chinese valuing the constant stars more than the variable sun and moon. And so the north star is China’s star, and because the star is purple, purple is the royal colour and the word for purple is also the word for star, and consequently, it is also the word for forbidden, which doesn’t so much mean forbidden as it means so exalted as to be untouchable by ordinary people. So the Forbidden City is also the Forbidden Palace, which is also the Star Palace and the Purple Palace, even though it is mostly red. But the red has to do with fire because fire gives birth to earth, which gives birth wood which gives birth to water which gives birth to metal. Which somehow explains why the roofs are gold. And there were stories of emperors and concubines and concubines who ruled from the shadows behind their sons who were heirs to the throne. And the story of the last emperor, the one that lived through the cultural revolution, and about the isolation of his childhood and I got thinking about the ghosts of this place, the whispers of the past. And despite the thousands of people wandering the grounds, the Forbidden City felt to me like a lonely place. A place of history, a place of memory. A place of echoes and whispers.
A parallel set of non-blurry photographs taken by my partner, Monna McDiarmid, can be found in her post, The Red Wall of China, at monnamcdiarmid.com. |
Under the Red Wall
Beijing, China. April 2013.
The Puddlewonder Press 