But we are stars…
“Constellations“
An Indie photo book publication project
This is an indie Publication project of a collection of photos I took during 2010-2011 when I was studying in Edinburgh. One of the critical features of these photos is that they were all taken with the iPhone 4, which was released and became famous in 2010. Later, some of these photos won a photographic competition, and I had a group exhibition with the other two winners.
Because these photos were taken with an iPhone 4 at the time, the quality of the pictures was not very good, and the resolution was not high enough to print in large sizes.
This problem, on the contrary, allowed me to test the images. Later, I decided to utilise the collaboration of the paper's texture and the ink's colour to rebuild the ambience of each scene I took.
“Everyone is a star in the universe, gazing at each other from a distance, both independent and distinct according to the rules of creation. Everyone is a lonely star; only in the stillness of the night sky do we find the frequency of the same colours.”
Production
This was an indie publication project I conducted in 2017. It was about six years since those photos were taken in 2010 in Edinburgh, and by then, I finally got the time and funding to think about how I should present and record those memories.
I spent a lot of time choosing the paper and ink colour I wanted to print for the photos. All the images are in B/W, but I did not print them in the way everyone might think they should be. Instead, I chose to recreate and depict the ambience by combining the paper texture and the ink colour.
Everyone lives within a group but is also an independent individual. We take pleasure in tremendous happiness but endure immense loneliness because we are so close, yet the distance between people’s hearts is so far. By observing the crowd and myself, I try to find out what makes us identical to each other and what makes each of us unique. Perhaps ultimately, I find that, although we are essentially the same, our mutual interactions and accumulated experiences make each of us different. Because of our memories of such interactions, we can be further assured that we are truly living.
Exhibition
2018, I was invited to join the group exhibition at the Taipei Photo International Photography Festival in Taipei, Taiwan. I selected three series of pieces and printed them in a larger format for a visually experimental test. Even though the original size of the photos was small and the resolution was insufficient for such large-size prints. Still, if we stood in the distance and viewed the images, we might ignore the problem and feel we were right at the scene.
