紀念 (Commemorate)

I will change things up a bit these week and share several images of a single event: The memorial event in Taipei for the Tiananmen Square protests and the June 4th massacre. I have written about the event here, so I will focus on the photos here.

Genres in photography are very fluent. I think much of what I do falls under the labels of “travel photography” and “portraits” (images I take of landscapes and friends when traveling), “street photography” (capturing moments outside), or “urban photography” (broader streetscape or architecture images that don’t feature people or moments prominently). I’m not agnostic about all this, I just take images.

Getting to Chiang Kai-Check memorial for the memorial event, I had a distinct intention though that changed my approach a little bit: I wanted to tell the story of the evening, to document for me and others what’s happening overall. I liked how this shifted my focus to immerse myself not only with the place but also its story and meaning. And while “documentary photography” usually goes way beyond this as you engage with a setting for not an hour but weeks, months, or even years, I started to appreciate that work a bit more.

(Editing: Even though the image looks very cinematic, the colors are mostly natural. I only warmed the tents in the background a bit to make them less distracting. The other part was lifting the shadows as it was quite dark and my wide-angle lens as a minimum aperture of 3.5. I’m fascinated how the camera deals with that!)