About forty years ago, high school student Cheng Sang-hsi (鄭桑溪) bought a cheap, secondhand camera and began taking pictures of his hometown of Keelung, a port city in northern Taiwan. He kept the camera in his bookbag and would pull it out on his way to and from school, snapping pictures of whatever attracted his eye along the way. His impetus was not only a fascination with photography—at that time an uncommon hobby in Taiwan—but also a desire to record the quickly changing scenery of his childhood. In grainy black and white, he captured the town’s old-style brick storefronts, the bustling marketplaces, the pedicabs that lined the main street, the American sailors who came ashore every weekend, the townspeople in their conical bamboo hats going about the day’s business along narrow, dusty roads. “I paid special attention to the scenes that I thought would soon be gone,” he says.
Today, these photos of old Keelung have become a valuable resource for understanding Taiwan’s past. The quick pace of industrialization and urbanization has given rise to a growing back-to-roots sentiment among the population and a keen nostalgia for any remnants of yesterday. Chang’s photographs are now in demand among advertisers, political parties, TV stations, even insurance companies.
One of the shots from his 1959 series of a railway maintenance yard, full of imposing old-time locomotives surrounded by great wafts of white steam, has been seen on everything from business calendars to campaign handouts. It was even used as a background image for the opening credits of the 1988 film Neverending Memory, a locally produced romance set in the old Taiwan countryside. For this photo alone, Cheng has made more than US$40,000 on royalties—a feat that he considers mostly a matter of luck. “It’s just fortunate,” he says, “that I happened to document my old hometown in time and kept the photos well-preserved.”
The money, however, has not always come easily. When people first began reprinting his photos about five years ago, it was usually without permission. The first time was when he discovered one of his shots in the Neverending Memory credits and had to fight the film company in court before receiving a US$9,600 settlement, which Cheng donated to the Consumers’ Foundation. The same photo was used without permission by the Democratic Progressive Party and by an insurance company, and another shot of old Keelung was used by a Kuomintang candidate for the National Assembly elections in 1991. But these cases were all settled out of court, and since then most of the organizations reprinting his photos have contacted him in advance. Thanks to Cheng’s efforts, local photographers are now much more aware of their right to compensation.
But these photos have been more than a lesson in intellectual property rights or a lucrative source of income. They have also helped to solidify Cheng’s reputation as one of the forerunners of photojournalism in Taiwan. By the 1960s, he had become one of the island’s first professional magazine photographers of any merit. And although his magazine career lasted only a few years, it helped to give new status to the use of photographs in local publications. He also helped to set the scene stylistically, using the same straightforward and unpretentious approach found in his early works on Keelung.
But it is these early works, done before Cheng was a professional, that have proved to have the most staying power. While many of them have a rough, grainy quality, reflecting the poor-quality equipment and limited darkroom facilities that the young Cheng had access to, they are admired for their simple and lyrical realism. “What you find in his works are just fragmentary frames of real life,” says photographer Kuo Li-hsin (郭力昕). “But they touch you like passages of poetic prose.”
When Cheng, now 59, first started to aspire to a career in photography in the mid-1950s, the field was relatively new in Taiwan and limited mainly to a few prominent figures and a handful of professional studios. With a per capita GNP of less than US$200, even owning a camera was considered a luxury. “I hardly knew what a Rollei or Leica was,” Cheng says, “and there was little access to foreign information about photography.” With nothing but a used Pigeon camera, a small amateur type no longer made, he became the youngest member of one of the island’s few photography clubs. The group’s leader, Chang Tsai (張才), was already well known for his own realistic, down-to-earth shots of everyday life in Taiwan and had a strong influence on Cheng’s style. Under his guidance, Cheng won several prizes at the Taipei Photography Salon, at that time the only place on the island that sponsored regular photography competitions and exhibitions.
In 1959, Cheng went on to study photography at the journalism department of National Chengchi University, then the only school that offered college level courses in the field. But Cheng found the curriculum elementary and unchallenging and put much of his energy instead into founding a school photography club and joining extracurricular photo tours sponsored by the government’s China Youth Corps. His best work from this time was a series on the Yami tribespeople of Orchid Island, just off the southern coast of Taiwan. These photos, which were published in the English-language China News, offered a stark, moving portrayal of the simple lives and customs of the Yami.
After graduating in 1964, Cheng landed a job with the Government Information Office (GIO). This gave him the chance to take a wide variety of photographs, including news assignments and feature photos for the GIO’s Vista pictorial, a monthly magazine on Taiwan that was published in seven languages and distributed around the world. In addition to photographing the scenery and culture of the island, he also helped document the island’s political history with numerous pictures of President Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang attending public functions.
Cheng left the GIO after three years and went to work as a staff photographer for a company that had just launched two new magazines, The Woman and Scooper Monthly. Shortly afterward, he did what has become one of his best-known projects, a series of forty-two photos of the Red Leaf Little League team, which defeated the Japanese world champion team in 1968 and helped set off a baseball craze in Taiwan. After the team had won the island championship and was getting ready for its match with Japan, Cheng traveled to their small south-island village and captured their youthful energy and rural way of life. This series, published later that year in the first issue of Scooper Monthly, was regarded as a milestone in photojournalism. Before then, no magazine or newspaper had devoted so much space to a single series of photographs.
But Cheng found much of his other work for the two magazines unchallenging. “I had to do assignments on fashion, hairstyles, makeup, flower arranging, even advertisements,” he says. After one year, he quit and went to Tokyo for a master’s degree in filmmaking at Waseda University.
Upon his return in 1973, however, Cheng was compelled to cut his photography career short in order to help run the family fishing business. “My father gave me an ultimatum,” he recalls. “Either I helped him out, or he would break off all ties with me.” Cheng stayed with the business until about ten years ago, when it finally closed down. During that time he continued to pursue photography as an avid pastime, publishing his works through the Keelung Photography Association, which he had founded in 1963.
His works today continue to document his hometown as well as the rest of the island. He has expanded his mainly black-and-white portfolio to include color works, such as a series published in 1993 on the Yi minority people of southwestern China. Since the late 1980s, he has also held regular exhibitions of both old and new works at the National Museum of History and several cultural activity centers around the island. In addition, he has published five collections of his works.
Over the years, Cheng has maintained his strictly realistic approach to photography and remains unmoved by many of the newer, more abstract or conceptual styles that he sees. “These days, young people are eager to publish their works even though they’re not mature yet,” he says, “and they tend to use difficult and confusing terms to explain their photographs.” Just because a work is innovative or difficult to understand, he says, does not make it better than a traditional or straightforward photograph. Cheng maintains that the best photos are those that are accessible to the public and that present a clear and honest depiction of life. These qualities, he believes, are more important than slick technical quality or artistic refinement. Cheng always remembers what his first teacher, Chang Tsai, taught him: “The true is more important than the good or the beautiful.”