Reflections on Photography

I find myself, again and again, drawn to this simple image: a man, smoking a paste chandu in the Chinese style, prepares his pipe as he must of done hundreds of times.

However, this modest photograph speaks widely and verbosely about opium and the way it has come to be depicted. When the word opium is muttered the mind of the unacquainted is visited by the stuff of Victorian nickel rags: Chinamen in long silk shirts sit astride glowing lamps, lavish drapery, pristine, gilded accoutrement. Certainly, the experience may have been attainable in a different time and to a select few, but, even still, the realities of opium smoking are far different.

This photograph, for example, shows what one can presume to be the roll of a middle class smoker, perhaps a successful business man. It contains, at the very least, a bamboo or lacquer tray, a bowl stand for back up bowls, a high quality bamboo pipe with a well set saddle, and, most excitingly, a delicate glass lamp, but what one truly sees is the disorder of it all.

This tray has not been curated, neither by a socially conscious owner seeking to curry favor with guests nor a collector. The surface of the tray is visible worn, coated with dirt and specks of dross. The bowl stand alone is a surface on which so much dust has made its way that the smoker’s fingerprint is left behind after reaching for a favorite bowl. Oil stains from the lamp ring the tray’s once polished surface and the lamp itself is stained from hastened filling and repeated use. Perhaps most surprisingly, one can even see the circular piece of waste cloth with a hole cut in the middle, stained with dross, which, although necessary for producing a tight seal when the bowl is attached to the pipe, is so scarcely seen in photos of opium smoking that one would never know that they’re always there.

This candid photograph shows the lived experience and psychological space of the opium smoker, as I know it to be. Concerns such as maintenance fall on the way side as the pipe draws you in again and again. Namely, what is most important about this photo is that it gives voice to the lived experience of the opium smoker over and against the racialized romanticism, impregnated with questionable attitudes on the poise and wisdom of “the cultured by barbaric Orient”. It posits, albeit in a minor fashion, a multi-centric world, as opposed to a eurocentric one.

This speaks to the power of photography, as expressed by Walter Benjamin, to function as medium for social and political change by not only making images politicized but also accessible to a mass audience. In a Heideggerian sense, these images open up a space in which a particular engagement with history and place is made possible in and through the image itself.