VOP Issue 15: THE LEFT SIDE OF IMAGES

This issue, using photography as a method of engagement, focuses on a critical perspective – the left-wing – and its practice and historical significance in imagery.

Can images be "left" or "right"? This is the first question we pose. As capitalism sweeps across the globe, becoming the central focus of people's ideologies and livelihoods, how does photography lean left? If photography can be "left" or "right," then what would be to the left of the image? How does a left-wing image come into being? We ponder this proposition, raising many questions. As the world tilts to the right, we question photography's rebellious energy and political practice, attempting to explore and investigate through this special issue. Perhaps somewhere in the darkroom, there is still a wandering ghost, a spark of idealism, and a trace of history developed.

In this issue of "Voice of Photography," Ho Ching-Tai's "White Archives" evokes the red youth confined during Taiwan's White Terror period in the 1950s, tracing a dark chapter of Taiwanese history; Lin Shen-Ching reviews the bumpy path and rise and fall of the left-wing in Taiwan, as well as the current development of the international left; Chang Shih-Lun analyzes the impact of the humanistic concern of left-wing ideals on Taiwanese documentary photography and the photographic transformations in the "post-Renjian" era, through the realist photography trend initiated by "Renjian" magazine in the 1980s; Kuan Hsiao-Jung explores the "left" and "right" vocabularies of images from his own photographic practice; Kuo Li-Hsin sorts out the left-wing issues in Taiwanese documentaries, and simultaneously interviews Professor Zhang Xianmin of Beijing Film Academy, portraying the Chinese context of contemporary "left-wing documentaries"; Gu Zheng deeply explores the production and ideological shaping of left-wing images during China's Cultural Revolution, offering an in-depth critical analysis of the visual politics of this ultra-left movement; Li Wei-Yi investigates several photographic albums published by the left-wing camp during Hong Kong's 1967 riots, exploring the visual historical perspective in this largest left-wing struggle in Hong Kong's history; Ryuichi Kaneko contemplates the logic of resistance in Japanese photography through the "New Left" anti-establishment movement in Japan amidst the global wave of rebellion in the 1960s. The included "SHOUT" in this issue re-presents "San Zi Ji," a proletarian propaganda booklet compiled by the "Taiwan Red Relief Society" in the early 1930s and banned by the Japanese colonial government, re-reading the historical poems left by Taiwanese communist party members.

Furthermore, in May, we also organized a rare dialogue in Tokyo, inviting senior photographers Kitai Kazuo and Watanabe Mayumi, who documented Japan's most representative and important student movements—the Nichidai and Todai "Zenkyoto"—in 1968, to look back at an era of radical revolution they witnessed firsthand. This was also the first time in nearly half a century that these two, among the very few who could enter and photograph within student organizations at the time, engaged in an image-based dialogue about this historical student struggle in Japan.

In the Artist's Showcase section, we specifically interviewed Chinese photographer Xu Yong and featured his recently published latest work—"Negatives." In 1989, Xu Yong photographed China's largest pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, and this year, he finally compiled and developed these images in negative form. Even after 26 years, "June Fourth" remains a taboo topic for Chinese authorities. The souls in the square are still roaring, and we will try to find the positive image of history and the meaning of photography in each negative frame.