Portfolio: Stone Poet

John Yang's Lyric Journey

by David Brickman, September 28, 2007

Looking at John Yang’s pictures of Thacher Park is like going back in time—geologic time. Many of the New York City-based photographer’s images of the Indian Ladder Trail (a long-popular attraction in the family-friendly state park west of Albany) are such close-cropped details of the rock—striated, layered, chipped, and chunked as it is—that you couldn’t imagine where or when these pictures were taken. And the landscape views, though quite classic in their way, are rendered in such subtle, misty tones, that they, too, seem to be of another age and a distant geography.

This displaced quality is both the magic and the necessity of Yang’s photography, now hanging in a solo exhibition at the Albany Institute of History & Art. Without it, we’d just be looking at the thing he photographed. With it, we are transported.

Yang spent five years making and sequencing the 38 prints that comprise “Indian Ladder, A Lyric Journey,” which is a long time—since it took Mother Nature many millions of years to create his subject matter, it seems fitting that he would approach it slowly. Yang grew up in New York, and brings a distinct East-West sensibility to this work. In an 80-page, full-color catalog that accompanies the exhibition, he says: “I am, by upbringing, a Confucian. I am, by nature, a Taoist. I am, by outlook, a Puritan.” This amalgamation of devotion to family, cultivation of simplicity, selflessness, and strict morality seems to have served Yang well in pursuing his arduous and reflective photographic method.

Born in China in 1933, he began showing his pictures in New York galleries and museums in the 1960s; he worked for more than 20 years as an architect before retiring in 1978 and devoting himself fully to his art. Yang shares significant characteristics with a number of other Asian or Asian-American photographers: They work slowly, with large cameras; they make low-key prints, often emphasizing a very narrow tonal range within the black-and-white continuum; and they distill quiet images from simplified subjects—usually still life, the nude, or landscape. Examples of this type of subtle work are readily available from Japanese-born photographers (Hiroshi Sugimoto and Kenro Izu come to mind); Yang is among a group of lesser-known Chinese-American photographers working in this mode.