Aperture's Blog, page 120

Lesson 16

In lesson sixteen, students are asked to consider context and audience, and how these two elements impact meaning. Gordon Parks’s first photo-essay featured in Life magazine serves as a prime example of how sequencing and context influence the meaning of photographs. Using printouts of Parks’s images, students make editing choices based on what story they want the images to tell. This activity encourages students to edit and sequence their own photographs based on how well their images fit with their chosen theme.

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Lesson 15

By lesson fifteen, students should be pursuing their book projects and how to develop their themes further. The class considers the work of Richard Renaldi and the themes found in his project Touching Strangers. Students will be asked to review their own photographs and make a “shot list” that covers the photographs that are needed in order to complete their project. By the end of this lesson, students will understand that themes can change and reshooting is often necessary.

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Lesson 14

In lesson fourteen, students engage in an open discussion surrounding the works of Gillian Laub and LaToya Ruby Frazier, two artists who make different artistic decisions when photographing their families. During class, students have time to revisit their mind maps and review their chosen themes. Students are asked to photograph their neighborhoods, and will begin to actively conceptualize and work toward their chosen themes.

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Lesson 13

In lesson thirteen, students brainstorm themes and create mind maps for their final projects. A mind map is a visual thinking tool that allows students to better understand as well as generate new themes and ideas for their projects. Students can look at their mind maps later on in the curriculum when they need inspiration and motivation regarding their projects.

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Lesson 12

For the twelfth lesson, teachers are encouraged to bring in their favorite photobooks and hold a discussion about the different shapes, sizes, and designs of photobooks and how they work together with the images to create a visual and tactile experience. Students discover that not all photobooks are the same and that each book tells a different story. This lesson motivates students to begin thinking about their own work in its final book form.

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Lesson 11

Lesson eleven introduces students to the idea of context: how and where we encounter images on a daily basis. Students will understand that where we first see images has a direct impact on our interpretation of their meaning. Students are challenged to manipulate the context in order to change the meanings of photographs. This lesson includes works by Susan Meiselas, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and Hank Willis Thomas.

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Lesson 10

The tenth lesson challenges students to make spontaneous, natural-looking photographs of people on the street. Unlike the previous lesson where students collaborated with their subjects, lesson ten is about becoming comfortable photographing strangers in public and realizing that it takes time to make a successful photograph.

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Lesson 9

Lesson nine engages students in how to approach, photograph, and interact with subjects. This lesson encourages students to take what they have learned in previous lessons—truth, symbols, form—and use these tools while collaborating with others when making portraits. The works of Richard Renaldi, Robin Schwartz, and Wayne Lawrence help students understand that there are a number of approaches to making portraits.

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Lesson 8

The eighth lesson introduces the use of text and the ways in which it can work with photographs. Students learn that text can be used to tell a more complete story rather than simply act as a caption for an image. Dawoud Bey’s series Class Pictures is a perfect example of text being used in concert with photographs to tell a story. Students consider both the text and the images separately and then together. Students will be able to write brief, personal narratives to accompany their pictures, as well as understand that photographs and text can work together to describe someone both internally and externally.

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The Subversive Fantasies of Ren Hang (1987–2017)

Aperture remembers the surprising, defiant work of the Chinese photographer. Despite China’s strict censorship, Hang’s playful vision cleverly pushed the limits of self expression.

By Stephanie H. Tung

Ren Hang, Untitled, 2013-14

One of China’s most distinctive young photographers, Ren Hang makes cool, saturated images that are tightly composed and lit with stark flash. Prominently featuring red lips, black hair, and supple flesh, his photography creates a world where sex, desire, and the joy of voyeurism create a visceral effect. Although most of his recent solo exhibitions have been held outside of China, viewers have gravitated toward his work when it has appeared in group shows in Beijing and Shanghai.

Ren Hang, Untitled, 2014

Born in 1987, Ren Hang left his home in Changchun city in Northern China to study advertising at the Communication University of China in Beijing. He began photographing his friends as an escape from the tedium of class. Using a small Minolta point-and-shoot camera, Ren Hang acts as director, moving hands and legs, lifting girls on top of girls, and arranging flowers on top of men. The subjects are all close friends or models he interviews beforehand who trust and respond well to the photographer’s demands. The resulting photographs—untitled and dated only for convenience—do not consciously attempt to address queer identity in China but rather function as a form of play or performance in a place where any explicit declaration of same-sex orientation is still considered risky and nude photographs are routinely labeled pornographic.

Ren Hang, Untitled, 2013-14

Since his first photographs from 2008, Ren Hang’s images have shifted from seemingly candid shots of individual nudes to more complex compositions involving groups of people interacting with each other and props. Though he acknowledges a debt to the frank displays of sex by photographers such as Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin, and Araki Nobuyoshi, Ren Hang identifies most with the dark absurdity of Shuji Terayama, a filmmaker best known for his surreal theater and cinema. Like Terayama, Ren Hang explores the erotic through startling juxtapositions that evoke fantasies: “My work is all about sex, lust, and porn,” says Hang, “but I’m not quite at the point where I can make people feel desire yet.” Though Ren Hang’s photographs often depict same-sex relations, in his work gender and sexual preference dissolve as he directs the models into provocative arrangements and compositions. The nude bodies become so strange and fluid and bare that it is difficult to pin any label on them.

Ren Hang, Untitled, 2013-14

Ren Hang has learned to adapt to the censorial conditions of working in China. He develops and scans his film at private studios to avoid obscenity charges and has become keenly aware of the potential for censorship. Still, he is often harassed online, and his works, when on public view, have been spit upon or taken down, leaving only empty frames. Yet when asked if he wants to continue working in Beijing, Ren Hang responds: “Yes, of course; even though China refuses me, I don’t care. China is still pretty conservative, but it’s the same elsewhere, and not even young people are exempt [from sharing these views]. As long as I like photographing, then I’ll still photograph.” Precociously self-aware, Ren Hang is part of a new generation of young photographers in China daring to push the limits of society from within with bold, defiant work.

Stephanie H. Tung 
is a PhD candidate focusing on modern and contemporary Chinese
 art at Princeton University. She was a contributing author to The Chinese Photobook , published by Aperture in 2015.

This essay was originally published in Aperture Issue 218, “Queer.”

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