{"id":16940,"date":"2012-02-24T09:57:47","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T13:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/?p=16940"},"modified":"2012-02-24T09:57:47","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T13:57:47","slug":"jeff-liao-big-pictures-for-a-big-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/?p=16940","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Liao: Big Pictures for a Big City"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source from NYTimes<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao loved documentary and street photography \u2014 until an internship at Magnum Photos led him to a sobering conclusion.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou go through their contact sheets and it strikes you,\u201d he said. \u201cI was never going to be better.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he could be bigger.<\/p>\n

Over the last 10 years Mr. Liao has produced a series of urban panoramas where he has married the precision and color of large-format film with the manipulations of digital processing (though more recently he has been using a custom-built medium format digital camera). The results \u2014 now on exhibit at the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan \u2014 are huge, intricate prints full of light, textures and a hyper-real perspective.<\/p>\n

But a closer look will reveal impossible combinations of light and detail that could not be captured in a single exposure. Some of his images require multiple shots over a period of six hours or more. His recent digital work has him using a long lens to take \u201ca couple of hundred\u201d frames of scenes like Times Square where only a sliver of pedestrians are in sharp focus, while the backgrounds goes soft.<\/p>\n

It is a world that exists solely in his mind \u2014 and in prints.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not real, but your brain says its real,\u201d he said. \u201cI am documenting a concept. It looks documentary. I love to see how an image can be seen on so many different levels by a viewer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Liao was born in Taiwan, raised in Vancouver and studied photography in New York. He lives in Jackson Heights \u2014 a dizzyingly diverse neighborhood that inspired his first major project, \u201cHabitat 7,\u201d consisting of panoramas shot along the route of the elevated train in Queens. He honed his method for approaching his cinematic urban landscapes.<\/p>\n

Hauling about 50 pounds of gear \u2014 a view camera, film and a tripod \u2014 he divides a scene into three segments, then does as many as 10 exposures per segment. He then scans the film and manipulates it digitally. It demands a lot of advance preparation and planning. All told, it could take two weeks to make an image.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to eat and breathe the same thing as people in a neighborhood,\u201d he said. If I\u2019m going to expose 30 sheets of 8-by-10 film, that\u2019s expensive, and everything has to be right. So I go someplace first to get a feel for things, to calculate where I shoot, to see how the light hits and how it moves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among his projects are a series on the old Shea Stadium and its successor, Citi Field, a commission by the Bronx Museum of the Arts to document the Grand Concourse and a personal project on Coney Island. He calls his current endeavor \u201cThe Manhattan Project,\u201d which could apply either to its subject or its complexity.<\/p>\n

Elisabeth Biondi, the former director of photography at The New Yorker, who curated the South Street show, said that while she grew up with traditional film photography \u2014 and its rules \u2014 Mr. Liao\u2019s work showed some unexpected new directions.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is quite extraordinary,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a true surprise. He has carried it further and further. What impresses me is he pushes it on and on. He makes it more complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

His next challenge is a commission by the Museum of the City of New York to document Staten Island. When he finishes, he will have compiled a panoramic collection of the five boroughs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis project is for New Yorkers,\u201d he said. \u201cI love New York. But in two years, I\u2019m going back to Asia to make pictures there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source from NYTimes Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao loved documentary and street photography \u2014 until an internship at Magnum Photos led him to a sobering conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-up-to-date-news-on-everything-asian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16940"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16943,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16940\/revisions\/16943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asianinny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}