Artist Statement

“It is always the form that comes first, not the concept. It is the form that inspires, executes, and completes my work, not the concept. When I take pictures, I never have any concept in my mind. What I am conscious of throughout the whole process is the form.

“Form is not just shape and colour. It is a comprehensive visuality and physicality, which has a flow of compositional consistency, order, and balance. Form is in the domain of intuition. Concept is in the domain of reason. Intuition and reason are equally important, but intuition comes first, and reason comes later. That’s why my work begins with the form, and after the work is finished, I start discovering the concept.

 “The kind of form that I am interested in is the relationship between a subject and the background, and their balance. I have never been drawn to a subject by itself. A lot of people take pictures of interesting subjects, which is fine. But to me, a subject alone has never interested me. Only when the subject is placed in the right background, I press the shutter. Here, a right background means a right time and a right space where the presence of the subject can be dramatized even to a surrealistic level. That’s the right background I am looking for. I also want the background to be as minimal as possible. I want a very clean-cut well-composed background, nothing messy interrupting, because I think minimal is surreal. And surreal is minimal.

“I had been playing with such formality in my first and second series (see www.schinster.com). Street Drama, my third series, was also nothing more than an experiment to apply the same formality now to people in human scale. Its form is simply an evolution from the first and second series. But its concept is now completely different.

“The concept for Street Drama is that I walk down the street and find a certain place that I like, which becomes the background for the picture. Then I fix my camera and start shooting the people passing by that background. I take literally a thousand shots of the people passing by the same background. Among those people I have shot, I sort out the ones that I like, and compose them in one scene as if they all existed at the same time. So each person is shot separately, but when I place each person in the scene, the locational integrity is maintained. That is, I do not copy and paste random people who have not passed by that particular background. Those who appear in the picture have actually passed by.

 “Each person in the picture represents a single moment, and the final picture collective moments. The space is fixed as a constant, but the time is distilled as variables, which is represented by the rearrangement of each person. Distillation of time is particularly meaningful because it is exactly how drama is made. Drama is not simply listing what happened in the order of time, but rearranging what happened in an imaginative way. It is a non-linear editing process.

“This whole process makes me feel as if I am conducting an opera or directing a musical. The background I choose is like a stage and taking pictures of the people is like an audition. These people are simply walking by, but to my eyes, they are performing something like acting or dancing. It’s as if they have come to my audition in the stage that I designated. When I sort out and composite the pictures, it’s like I am choosing the best actors for my drama. As I place each character in the scene, I complete my own photographic drama.”