{"id":19,"date":"2011-01-19T02:58:13","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T02:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2016-04-09T02:58:49","modified_gmt":"2016-04-09T02:58:49","slug":"to-film-or-not-to-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/2011\/01\/19\/to-film-or-not-to-film\/","title":{"rendered":"To film or not to film"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It\u2019s drier than the desert here. Yellow soil, dust, dirt, more dust. It snowed lightly the night I came here, and that added a sense of sadness somehow. Those who came before me gave this place a romantic sounding name that is impossible to translate, but it would include west, ocean, keeping. No oceans in the middle of the middle kingdom, and water here is so hard to find a village calls itself \u201ccrying for water\u201d. It\u2019s the high plateau of the yellow soil.<\/p>\n

In the morning, there was no bus going to the ruin I wanted to see because of the icy road. So I just hopped on another bus that took me through the dirty country side, not knowing where its destination was. City scenes gave way to barren fields and brick and mud houses.<\/p>\n

Something about this place that made me just want to be silent. I even hesitated to take out my camera.<\/p>\n

Aesthetic of suffering, maybe that\u2019s the word, and that\u2019s the question on my mind. Under what situation, is it appropriate to photograph something, a place, people that are suffering? Do I have the right to do that as someone just passing by?<\/p>\n

A small town to get off. Squeaking loud horn from big trucks. Dingy repair shops. Shops selling car-wheel sized hard-as-stone breads. Trash frozen in sewage on the street. I didn\u2019t have the courage to photography this desert, a desert even more destitute than the real desert I have just visited, with camels.<\/p>\n

So, why I choose these places? Something about the suffering of one place and its people that makes it look beautiful on screen? Was I looking for some sort of village utopia that would only exist in my fantasies? It\u2019s all too easy to beautify, to hero-ize, to sensationalize, and suffer-ize what one sees. In this place and any other places, I am and will always be an outsider looking through my lens, do I have the knowledge and emotional capacity to film it right, without simplifying and generalizing? Do I have the courage to go in and really feel it with my heart? To this one, I have to say no. Maybe when I grow stronger I can, but not now yet. For now, I\u2019m sticking to the real desert. Think those who deal with real sufferings. Hats off to James Nachtwey.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s drier than the desert here. Yellow soil, dust, dirt, more dust. It snowed lightly the night I came here, and that added a sense of sadness somehow. Those who came before me gave this place a romantic sounding name that is impossible to translate, but it would include west, ocean, keeping. No oceans in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waterdropfilms.com\/desertblog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}