Folktales

 

It is a slow, patient and worthy work that of Rona Chang. A kind of personal record for the many and often elusive signs of the persistent cultural complexity in the so-called globalized world, a notebook of an attentive and curious traveler, often perplexed if faced with what she calls “the marks of history and psychology” read through the human landscapes. These are the heart and the motives of the series, still in progress, entitled “Moving Forward, Standing Still”. It’s all about fixing “some cultural truths revealed through the activities of people in their daily lives”. The urban sprawl, sites of industrial activity, architectural infrastructures, and waterways, become elements of an intercultural continual tale, of a new wide and transversal geography. “Throughout the last couple of years as I have traveled to record an extended portrait of society through landscapes”, Rona Chang explains, “I have found the need to get closer and photograph people. Photographs bridge local and global experience, the gulfs between present and past, self and world”. China, but also San Francisco, Peru, Macau, Mexico and Taiwan, are some of the stages of this journey across cultures, alien to each other and yet familiar, with unexpected common features and incurable contrasts, in a kind of route to multiple dimensions, in space and time. “The pace at which the world is moving forward is quite dizzying”, she concludes, “but we each have our own time and place within it to stand still”.

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Rona Chang

www.ronachang.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)