Taiwan's Glory

Deng Nanguang

TaiwanDNA.com Homepage

 

 

 

 

Excerpt from 台北市立美術館

Deng Nanguang (鄧南光) was born in 1907 and died in 1971. This year marks the one-hundred year anniversary of his birth, and the museum is mounting the Deng Nanguang Photography Retrospective as well as producing an accompanying art catalog to celebrate this pioneer of Taiwanese photography. Deng Nanguang received affirmation for his work early in his career. From the 1940s, he along with Chang Tsai and Li Ming-tiao were known as “The Three Musketeers” (快門三劍客) and were considered the top photographers in Taiwan. But more importantly, Deng left an indelible mark on the development of this art form. He increased appreciation for photography by programming The Open Photography Exhibition, and founding The Photographic Society of Taipei, The Taipei Photographic Salon and The Taiwan Provincial Photographic Society. He devoted himself to publishing photography, promoting new technology and styles, and popularizing photography in general in the 1950s and 60s in Taiwan. Although Deng Nanguang was an important catalyst in the evolution of photography, he was hindered by the limited opportunities to show work in the under-developed exhibition system of his time. It was not until the early 1980s that an enormous number of Deng’s unseen works were revealed and the contours of his artistic career were clearly drawn. As we continue to study Deng’s works, the value of his aesthetic contributions to Taiwanese photography have become even more apparent, and his position in Taiwan photography history has become even more stable.  

 

鄧南光生於1907年，逝世於1971年，今年正逢其百歲冥誕，本館推出「凝視的浪漫－鄧南光百歲紀念展」並製作本紀念專輯，來追思這位台灣攝影的先驅。 鄧南光生前攝影造詣早受肯定，自1940年代末期起，即與張才、李鳴鵰齊名，享有「三劍客」之美譽。對於台灣攝影發展，鄧氏更有不可磨滅的功績。他集結攝影同好之力，規劃「自由影展」、「台北攝影學會」、「台北攝影沙龍」、「台灣省攝影學會」等組織的成立，並致力出版活動，推廣專業技術，對於1950、60年代台灣攝影風氣的普及與攝影風格革新的倡導，貢獻頗著。 只是鄧南光雖身為攝影發展重要的推手，但礙於台灣攝影展覽機制未臻成熟，作品發表終究機會有限。直到1980年代後期，即過世後十餘年，鄧南光生前未曾發表且數量驚人的作品才陸續曝光。自此鄧南光攝影創作的輪廓逐漸廓清，他的攝影美學對於台灣攝影藝術的貢獻得以確立，他在台灣攝影史上的地位更進一步的受到肯定。  

 

* 世代風景 ─ 快門三劍客 by 公共電視

* 獻給我曾經的時光－ 閒晃者（flaneur）鄧南光 by 周郁齡

* 鄧南光影像館今開館 北埔意境吸睛 by The Liberty Times

 

 

* 客家身影／鄧南光 鏡頭記錄台灣   by 何來美

Excerpt: 鄧南光是最早以相機記錄台灣風貌的攝影家，從台北大稻埕的繁華，到新竹北埔的樸實；從30年代的東京風情，到60年代的台北街景；他用鏡頭讓歷史「停格」，喚起老年人的回憶，也讓年輕一代了解台灣早期的風土民情。

近萬張底片 留存紀念館

 

 

 

東瀛寫真(1929~1935)

 

台北 平交道 1937

 

台北 太平町 1938

 

大溪 1938

 

台北太平町1940年代

 

關渡 1940

 

台北 轟炸後的城中區廢墟 1945

 

淡水沙崙海水浴場攝影比賽, 1948年

 

台北衡陽路.桃源街口1950年代

 

碧潭渡船上1950年代

 

酒室風情1950年代

 

酒室風情1950年代

 

新竹1950年代

 

九份1960年代

 

 

* A Study on the Character Image of Deng NanGuang's Social Documentary Photography by Li-ying Chen

Abstract: Deng NanGuang was the pioneer of social documentary photography in Taiwan. His contribution and influence had a profound effect to Taiwan photography history. Deng’s social documentary photography works were affected by the learning background in Japan. After returning to Taiwan, he was dedicated to photography promotion, popularized positively numerous photographic academic societies and photography exhibitions. He was an important catalyst in the evolution of photography. Deng NanGuang’s photograph subjects were built on the social life, which had documentary and affective characteristic, conveying “direct appearance” and “subjective emotionality”. Containing Hakka culture, social phenomenon and monographic subjects of Deng’s works from 1935 to 1960, it expressed sensibility and intrinsic meaning of the character image. And he focused on “human subjects” as well as humanities concern. Deng NanGuang’s works were the transition from surface to subjectivity. In addition to the value of historic records and preservation, his works had the micro observation of social issues. Participated in society and concerned about human subjects, Deng NanGuang was the excellent representation of Taiwan photographer in early time.

 

 

Documentary Photography

Documentary photography usually refers to a type of professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or student pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people.

History of Documentary Photography: The term "documentary" applied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances date to the earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American wilderness areas. Nineteenth century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the early 1850s to photograph the major ruins of the region; One early documentation project was the French Missions Heliographiques organized by the official Commission des Monuments historiques to develop an archive of France's rapidly-disappearing architectural and human heritage; the project included such photographic luminaries as Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray.

In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the Civil War by photographers for at least three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. A huge body of photography of the vast regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, the USGS, during the period 1868-1878, including most notably the photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.

Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: the production of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The US Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports, as well as portfolios designed to encourage continued funding of scientific surveys.

The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises. The refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftone reproduction around 1890 made low cost mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gather photographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably [[How The Other Half Lives]] of 1890 and [[The Children of the Slums]] of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.

Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the poor lived in the rapidly-expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospel and Progressive movements. His most famous successor was the photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular, made for the National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like The Survey, are generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States more generally.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary, both of rural and urban conditions. The Farm Security Administration, a common term for the Historical Division, supervised by Roy Stryker, funded legendary photographic documentarians, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott among others. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with impassioned advocacy, with the goal of arousing public commitment to social change.

During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric of photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s, published in the United States in his 1959 book , The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence on photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], which brought those two photographers together with their colleague Diane Arbus under the title, New Documents. MoMA curator John Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation, committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary" photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model of post-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75 served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing their visions and values on the disempowered.

 

 

 

Taiwanese Photography

Taiwanese photography is deeply rooted in the country's unique and rapidly changing history. Its early photography is often divided into two periods: Pre-Japanese from approximately 1858 to 1895, and an Era of Japanese Influence, from 1895 to 1945, the year the Japanese occupation of Taiwan ended. Much of the pre-Japanese era photography was conducted by foreign missionaries and merchants.

Chang Tsai (張才), Deng Nan-guang (鄧南光) and Lee Ming-diao (李鳴鵰), collectively known as the "three swordsmen", are among the best known of the Taiwanese photographers who were active in the 1930s to 1950s. Modern Taiwanese photography is marked by the Nationalist government's takeover of Taiwan in 1945.

Photographers International is considered one of Taiwan's leading photography magazines. The magazine profiled key Taiwanese photographers such as Chang Yung-Chieh (張詠捷), Wu Chung-Wei (吳忠維), Hsieh Chun-Teh, (謝春德), Ho Ching-Tai (何經泰), Chuang Ling (莊靈), Liu Chen-Shan (劉振祥) and editor Juan I-Jong(阮義忠) in an issue called "Taiwan Vision".

Another well-known Taiwanese photographer is Taiwan-born Chien-Chi Chang (張乾琦), a member of the famous Magnum Photos agency.

 

 

* 北埔豪門 先祖抗日 後代爭氣 by 高有智

Excerpt: 鄧南光出身新竹縣北埔的豪門世家「姜家」，因為祖父姜滿堂娶了 鄧登妹，雙方約定長子要繼承鄧家香火，這也是鄧南光的姓氏由來。 姜家名號在北埔可是響叮噹，家族成員橫跨政、商、學、醫界名流， 堪稱北埔第一大家。

鄧南光長子鄧世光說，從父親拍攝照片可以窺見他們家族的風光一 面，父親照相的攝影器材和底片都很貴，就連要開店創業，也需要很 大的資本，這全靠外公鄧瑞坤出錢資助，才能實踐攝影夢想。

北埔姜家分成「老姜」和「新姜」系統，老姜是指清朝時代開拓北 埔一帶的墾戶之首姜秀鑾家族，清朝政府委任姜家辦理地方稅收及維 護治安，總理地方大小事務，形成一方之霸；新姜的起源人則是姜滿 堂，他是姜秀鑾弟弟姜秀福的孫子，雖然晚了半世紀才遷入北埔，卻 在日據時代迅速崛起，後代子孫掌握政經與教育要職，影響當地政壇 長達六、七十年。

姜滿堂起初以殺豬為業，在能幹的妻子鄧登妹扶持下，開了一家雜 貨店「榮和號」白手起家，開始購地致富，成為地方富豪之一。鄧世 光也提起一段家族故事，當年老姜家族的姜紹祖舉事抗日，事敗後被 捕入獄，並在獄中服毒自殺，這是電影「一八九五」描述的真實故事 ，日方原有意沒收姜家財產，在姜滿堂出面協調下，才保住家產，姜 滿堂的么子姜瑞鵬也過繼給老姜家族，讓雙方親上加親。

 

新竹縣

新竹縣位於台灣西北部. 新竹縣的地形丘陵多而平原少，地勢由東南向西北逐次降低。高山地帶主要分佈於東南部，包括尖石、五峰二鄉，其中五峰鄉境內為雪霸國家公園之一部份，蘊含豐富的自然景觀資源。丘陵包括飛鳳山丘陵、 竹東丘陵、寶山丘陵等等，地勢起伏綿延，農作物方面，多種植旱作或茶葉、水果等經濟作物。湖口台地為由西向東的帶狀台地，湖口工業區為主要的傳統製造業集中地。頭前溪與鳳山溪是兩條主要河川。兩溪於入海處共同沖積出新竹平原，海岸有港口 及養殖業，另外在新豐之河川入海處有約十多公頃的紅樹林生態保護區。縣內居民以海陸腔客家人為主，近30年來由於新竹科學園區的發展，也吸引許多外來人口移居

 

 

 

Taiwan's Glory * 台灣之光 * Taiwan's Glory