Photographers Snap Up China

When photographer Paul Duda returned from China he slowed down his camera to extremely long exposures.

When photographer Phyllis Crowley returned, she realized the mist that had enveloped her in the Huangshan Mountains was the same kind of veil, simultaneously concealing and revealing, that she had been photographing for years through the dusty windows of Metro-North trains.

Meanwhile, Roy Money​‘s photographic travels to China were a momentous personal pivot in his life, as he felt instantly at home in a Zen culture he had already embraced.

The beautiful yet quietly disturbing photographic evidence of their experiences is on display in ​“Windows to the East: China Through the Local Lens.” It’s the newest show at the Silk Road Gallery on Audubon Street, and runs through May 21.

In remarks at Sunday’s opening reception, which drew at least three dozen admirers, the photographers talked about their quiet personal discoveries of a kind of artistic home away from home in China.

More than half of the 20 archival digital prints by Crowley, a long-time photography teacher at Creative Arts Workshop, are views of the Huangshan Mountains west of Shanghai.

Her images, mostly taken during a 2012 trip, of mists enveloping tree limbs and blanketing ponds, are back-lit with an almost white light. They seem almost too perfect in their beauty to be true.

Yet they are. Crowley said no Photoshopping or alteration was involved.

“It really looks like this,” she said, ​“inside a cloud. And it’s incredibly beautiful.”

Crowley instantly understood that so many of the images she had seen over the years of traditional Chinese painting on scrolls were distillations of just such landscapes. ​“A layer of cloud and sharp peaks,” she said, poking through.

Her ​“River Fog” (pictured) is an example ​“of how I could apply this to my own work,” she said. Because the river in question is none other than New Haven’s Mill River, as it appeared from the footpath adjacent to the Orange Street bridge.

As Crowley (pictured on the right with an admirer) pondered why she was so interested in pictures of mist and fog, she realized that she had been photographing them for years.

In 2006, she showed photos of views taken through train windows. In those works she had focused on the the foreground — the window — so that the backyards and landscapes beyond were out-of-focus, obscured.

Not unlike the intimate but obscuring feeling that comes through in her China images.

Whether what Crowley called the ​“interface” is a smudge on a window or mist in the air, its significance is the same. ​“You never know anything truly. You think you know something, but there’s an interface always,” whether that’s ego or fog, she said.

On The Money

If Crowley is trying to capture a macro-cosmic China in landscape, Roy Money’s 10 close-ups of walls, sculptural elements, or a floor of burned rice are trying to get to the same place by taking a different road. They are all about the micro or Zen heart of China. 

“In 2008 my photographic practice had been dormant,” said Money (pictured), who is on the verge of retiring from 25 years as a biostatistician at Yale University.

He had begun a Zen meditation practice some 15 years before, but the trip had what Money described as a ​“momentous effect.”

His images are patterns of color, text, line, and shape, but without context, which is Money’s Zen point: They ​“are released from the monopolistic associations of something easily recognized and can evoke the nature of a wider view,” he writes in an artist statement.

You could argue that Money could have taken these abstracted photographs anywhere — at any wall, or floor, or sidewalk — if he wanted to capture ​“the whole world embedded in a pearl or the whole universe embedded in the eye of a monk,” as he paraphrased aphorisms from Zen literature.

Yet his images have a lingering love about them, as if he had finally arrived at photographic pay dirt after a long journey to China.

Duda’s Day

Paul Duda, the long-time photography teacher at Educational Center for the Arts, spent a year in Taiwan as a 13-year-old boy when his father was there on a sabbatical.

Thirty years later, Duda is still in love with Chinese culture. He is the only one of the three artists whose images have people in them, and there’s a haunting reason for that. The daily life he captures in the five views of Shanghai in the show are not relatively new works, like those of Crowley and Money.

Duda’s images of the slow routines of daily life in China were taken less than a month after the World Trade Center bombings. In his remarks at the opening, Duda said taking photographs of people engaged in timeless, pre-industrial activities, like carrying vegetables or paddling a boat, was his way of dealing with the massive wipeout of thousands of individual lives on September 11, 2001.

In his one view of the Shanghai skyline, with cranes like sci-fi monsters back-lit by an apocalyptic orange sunset, he pictorially suggests that ​“I fell in love with a way of life [in China] that was less stressed. We are so consumed with money-making. Unfortunately that’s the way they’re going [too].” he said.

The man paddling or the woman shouldering heavy vegetables balanced at the end of a long bamboo pole have a kind of ​“nostalgie pour le present” that Duda has examined in numerous other trips to China, he said. He did an extensive photographic study of the alleyways and small streets of Beijing that were obliterated to make room for facilities of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Some of those images, published in The Vanishing Hutongs of Beijing, were included in a previous solo show Duda had at Silk Road Gallery earlier this year.

That documenting of obliteration in long camera exposures is a focus of Duda’s in other places internationally; alas, he’s very busy with shows around the world ​“documenting single events that change a mass of people forever.”

Taken together, the three artists’ different photographic responses to China — the place and the aesthetic — offer a brief, comprehensive, and cautionary tour of the fragility of civilization, whether an ancient and meditative one like China’s, or the newfangled and oh-so-frenetic one we Americans have invented.