Jamie Toh

I’m primarily a writer. Not really a photographer. I’ve always been more of the kind to paint pictures with my prose. However, there is something beautiful about a well-taken picture. There are some pictures that speak more to you than others. The phrase “a picture speaks a thousand words” is so cliché and I don’t even think it’s true. To me, a well-captured photograph captures the nuance and emotion of a moment. For me, the pictures I am most drawn to are the ones that feature people in them, and that have a distinct emotional charge.

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Therefore, when I set out to create these photo essays, I wanted one thing to shine through, the importance of the human experience. Be it in emotion, connection, relationships or various states of mind or place, I wanted that humanness to shine through in whatever visual narrative I created. What makes some more moments more significant than others? What added meanings are there that we can capture in a single snapshot?

 

An important area I had to interrogate myself in throughout this entire process was the relationship between words and image in a photo essay. No, scratch that. not just any photo essay. How do the words and images interact in my photo essays? It was a difficult question to grapple with, and I struggled with balancing the desire to leave the images to speak by themselves but be robbed of their beautiful context and origin, or to explaining myself dry and making the images a mere accessory. Here’s the thing, that balance is different for everyone. And even for myself, it varied very much from essay to essay, depending on my artistic intent.

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Hidden Communities

In this essay I discuss a community that lies close to my heart: The Taekwondo Club at the University of Michigan. In this essay, the images were partially meant to be dynamic representations of the way we train, but mostly to highlight the people and relationships within this community. There is something very special about the ties that bind a group of people who gather to kick each other. I used two textual strategies to support the images: captions and body text. With the captions, I aimed to avoid description, but rather, aim for clarification, to provide just enough context for the reader to appreciate the semantics of the photograph. With body text, I aimed to fill in a chronological narrative that would situate the curated images in the larger context of the club and how it is more than just some activities, it is a group of unique individuals who come together to share life.

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The Tableau

This essay was an interesting one. We were tasked to tell a chosen story in one image. I chose an excerpt from one of my favourite books, The Desire for Elsewhere by Agnes Chew. It is a beautifully written book of creative non-fiction, and her writing is poignant, evocative and thought-provoking. Everything I want in my own writing. Translating that to a visual medium though? Not the easiest thing. In the end, I exercised as much novice Photoshop prowess as I could conjure. In my tableau, the most important thing I wanted to convey was distance. Both a sense of physical distance and emotional distance. Physical distance is easy to capture. Almost too easy, easy enough to fall into visual tropes. What about emotional distance? How do you capture something so abstract, something you can’t concretely create like a prop? With this, I took on the challenge to reinterpret a conventional sense of distance as the horizontal space between people. What happens when you think of distance not just as horizontal, but in terms of depth? Depth of field, depth of feeling?

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The Journey

In some ways, this essay is an expansion from a section of the Hidden Communities essay. I took one of the highlights of a semester in Taekwondo, our tournament weekend, and expanded it into an essay of its own. Unlike the Hidden Communities essay,  however, rather than it being a story of relationships, it’s more a story of growth, development and the physical endeavour of travelling from the Midwest to the East Coast to compete and be back in 3 days, along with some other surprising challenges along the way. This essay had a significantly different approach to the text-image relation. The body of text is significantly larger, and I worried it would overpower the image narrative, but in the end I deemed it necessary, because of the nature of the story I was telling. This essay is a highlight for me, because it is a double journey of sorts. On one hand, it tells the simple story of a 3 day trip where a group of friends pile in a van, head out to New Jersey, compete for a day, and come back. Lots of fun! But on the other hand, it’s also a continutaoin of a previous writing experience, another journey essay I wrote a year and a half ago. In that essay, I wrote about a similar journey, another taekwondo tournament. However, that essay described my first ever taekwondo tournament, and I was brand new to the sport. A year and a half later, I’ve grown a lot as a taekwondo athlete and this latest tournament also marks an underlying, more long-term journey that you don’t see as clearly in the pictures. Thus, the text and images interweave to support the dual narrative of the double journey.

 

The Profile

A BIG thank you to Winny, one of my dearest friends I’ve been so privileged to meet in college, for being my subject for this. The premise of this essay was relatively simple. I wanted to capture Winny’s range of emotions. She’s a lovely, bubbly and bright person most of the time, and that was easy to let shine through, but I also wanted to capture her in her more intimate emotional moments, the slightly less joyful, her other, more private emotional sides. One challenge in this was I initially tried to do too much, props, costumes, settings etc. However, in editing my drafts and curating the final images, I decided to eschew everything distracting. I decided to shoot and curate everything as minimalistic as I could: same outfit, same setting, so as to put the focus on the emotions displayed.