I only found out about this exhibition quite by chance a week ago and managed to see it today. This is an exhibition at Locomotion at Shildon (which is about an hour’s drive away for me), an outpost of the National Railway Museum in York, which is the site of one of the very earliest locomotive building workshops. Despite its relative closeness I had no idea it even existed, which is a shame because it is an absolute gem. I am not really a railway buff but have visited the main site in York in the past and I enjoyed this visit even more because of the rather less overwhelming scale of the museum and its exhibits, which are still pretty impressive.
What I particularly wanted to see was this small but nicely staged exhibition of the work of Chinese photographer Wang Fuchun, of whom I had not heard before. Apparently over a period of forty years or so – the earliest images in this show date back to the 1970s, when China was very clearly a remarkably different country from what it is now – he travelled on every train in China and took hundreds of thousands of photos of people on those trains. Out of that massive haul of images this show contains just 45 but they seem to be very well chosen to give a true flavour of his work, and the way China has developed throughout the recent decades.
Nearly all of the photos are black and white: there are just a couple in colour and they stand apart as being shots of trains rather than in them and strike me as being rather too stylised. Nevertheless, still interesting enough in their own right as they depict some of the last steam trains (although, as I say, not a railway buff, I do have a soft-spot for steam trains – don’t we all, or at least those of us old enough to remember when they were not just curiosities or tourist attractions?).
The bulk of the work is simply of people on trains, each particular train route being identified in the caption with details such as the time the journey takes. Captions apart they are not really pictures about particular journeys, rather about the way people relate to those journeys. It is particularly striking that as the images become more contemporary so the passengers become more isolated from the country through which the trains travel as the trains become more ‘sealed’ and air-conditioned (more like aeroplanes in a way; indeed some of the seats look more like what you might expect on a plane) but also from each other as they become more engrossed in their mobile phones and tablets. There is hardly anyone in the more recent pictures who is depicted as doing anything as mundane as looking out of the window! (This is, I am sure, not just a Chinese thing and you would in all likelihood see the same things on any train today anywhere.)
Wang’s approach to his subjects is particularly interesting. Whilst photographs are proliferating at an unprecedented rate, and ‘every man and his dog’ is taking pictures on their phones, he has found that openly photographing people leads to too much hostility. People are happy to take pictures but not necessarily be photographed by others. He therefore does so subtly, if not surreptitiously. There is some interesting footage of him at work in a brief video interview that accompanies the stills: instead of a big camera he uses a compact automatic (in fact a Sony RX100) which he can point at his subjects without them necessarily being aware of what he is doing, or at least without him being blatantly obvious. The results are still technically good but benefit in particular from being candid and unstaged. In fact some people are evidently so engrossed in their phones that they were probably oblivious to his presence.
This style has parallels with the work of, for example, Daido Moriyama, who similarly uses a small compact camera and is practiced at catching people unawares. The main difference between the two though is that I guess Wang is pursuing a fairly refined aesthetic whereas Moriyama, in common with a number of other Japanese photographers that come to mind – the Provoke group, Masahisa Fukase, Hajime Kimura, for example – have much less refined, often positively ‘dirty’, anti-aesthetic approach.
So far as this course is concerned, this has been quite a timely discovery as I am already starting to think about how I might approach the journey theme in the next assignment. Bearing in mind also the pictures taken by Kazuma Obara on the Chernobyl train I have been thinking about making a sequence on my old train commute line into Newcastle. At the moment though I am leaning more to the idea of taking shots of the landscapes through which the train passes rather than of the people on board. I will return to this again and in more detail later.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 
2 thoughts on “One Billion Journeys – Exhibition”