Between Life and Objects

He arrived in Cardiff in 2009 to study cooking, a place of alchemy where he found no confidence or instinct to break free from the strict rules of text books. Instead, he skipped classes, and purchased, by accident, an analog camera, at a time when lomography was a trendy, instant and seductive exercise. He started taking pictures randomly, and took a chance on enrolling in a photography course at the University of East London.

“I was 21, and it was only when the university in London accepted my application that I told my parents,” says Macau photographer Rusty Fox.

As a student of Photography in London, Rusty was part of a small group that had the opportunity to spend a day in Newport with David Hurn, a Magnum photographer, born in 1934, who founded the well-known School of Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales.  The brief encounter inspired him to think more deeply about his focus as a photographer.

“The time I spent with him changed me a lot. I remember David Hurn asked me: ‘What kind of photography are you focused on?’ I said, ‘street photography’. And he was so angry: ‘what the hell is street photography? That doesn’t explain anything’ . He was so angry and surprised, and I was scared. He told me to focus on my motivation in relation to the theme and the project. I started to think about it and decided to go to Newport after my degree”.

After finishing his master’s degree in Newport, he began work on his first photographic project, Dummy in late 2016, in Bristol, a city of trip-hop and urban art, where he immersed himself in working in a night club, full of bodies exhausted by the banality of the succession of days.

“I applied for a job as a club photographer. I made an agreement with them: I will not receive any money from you, but you must give me the right to use all the photographs I take”.

Dummy was published in 2018. While showing the images in his book, Rusty describes the process of photographing ghost-like figures stunned by alcohol-induced excitement. “This is not staged, they are real people, drinking, using drugs in the club. I saw them every night, every weekend”.

Images where, with the exaltation of bodies, the expression of the eyes is removed, blurred to the point of removing their identities.

“When you see them in real life, getting so drunk and drugged, their eyes are just like that, they’re not focused on anything, they look lifeless. I felt that they were mannequins, dolls”.

Like characters? “Yes, people want to become attractive and act like that in the club. I felt like they were totally a character.  I, the ‘bartender’, and the dj stayed awake because we didn’t drink alcohol. We saw them and thought: they are all the same, doing stupid things. I saw how they were different, before and after drinking alcohol, people got so loose and did crazy things.

“And I was trying to erase their facial features, because it’s not important; you don’t need to see their eyes to get an emotion or a sense from their body, it’s body language. So I did this project. Of course it is very extreme, some people thought it was too much. It is my perspective of how I saw them as people, as objects, because they seemed to me to be objects, during that time”.

Rusty, (also known as Wang Lap Wong) returned to Macau in 2017, after 11 years in the UK. Now 29 years old, in addition to Dummy, he has developed four other projects Dark Specimen, Brutal, Mǎorganic and Form of Animals, adding to his body of work the same concept and interrogation, which oscillates between living and inanimate forms.

“It is the connection between objects and the human beings or living subjects. Because in Dummy, for example, they’re like living objects to me. It is a perfect example of how, at the same time, they are living creatures yet act as objects”.

More than a fine line between life and its absence, Rusty Fox speaks in symbiosis. “I wouldn’t even say that there is a fine line, everything is mixed today, because we depend on objects. What is the boundary between the object and the living creature?”

The scientific and biological focus are not removed from a set of images, where the relationship between living and inanimate organisms influences the photographer’s perception of urban life.

“I spent so many years looking at animal specimens. When we photograph specimens, we think: one day alive, another day an object. We have no answer to that, because science can turn animals into embalmed objects, people never think about it. Especially at this time when our life is mixed with technology, but we continue to try to find a natural way to live our daily lives. I am the type of person who asks questions about this relationship between life and objects”.

The photographer justifies the repeated use of black backgrounds in the images as a way to highlight the subject and make it more evident. “It is the means I use to isolate the subject from everything, to show the subject. When you isolate it, you realize how strange it is”.

The same is true of the photographs he started producing at the beginning of this year, driven by the void that invaded the city. They show images of tree branches, organic matter that seem to assume human form.

“Exactly, it is something organic. It is the trees that are around us, every day, in Macau. The branches in the city. What I thought was, if you don’t isolate them to see them as they are, you won’t realize that they are there and look like this. They were there long before I was born. These forms are more about how they present themselves. I started this at the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic”.

Why did he feel the need to do so? “Because when people were so focused on empty Macau and how the virus was affecting us, I thought I needed to see something differently. I started looking at the plants and realized that the virus would not affect them at all. You can see how some of them are so twisted; people cut the branches and they grew like this. The trees are like us, the people who live in the city; they have to be modified to adapt to the city, because if people don’t cut them, their branches will reach the road. They look like human beings, a distorted body, because they share the same elements with us”.

The project, with a concept that is still diffuse, will likely extend over more than a year. “I just thought about the relationship between the trees and the people who live in the city. I’m still working on it, a project always takes more than a year. When I start a project, I only take photographs, I lose interest in everything else”.

Just before returning to Macau, Rusty founded the Dialect group, made up of five photographers and designers. With a studio in the Barra area, the collective aims to promote the culture of photobooks in the territory, something that is still very uncommon in local libraries and bookstores.

“We are trying to build a library of photobooks in Macau, because there is a lack of a certain type of photography here. If you go to a library here, to a university, they may have something to teach you how to take pictures, but they don’t have photobooks”.

Along with Eduardo Martins, João Miguel Barros, Alice Kok and Adriano Ma, Rusty Fox is a jury member for the Photography Competition currently being held by Macau CLOSER, an initiative that the photographer says is a challenge for those who produce photography in the territory.

“I saw the rules, they are a challenge for people here, because the rules say that images cannot be edited a lot. I have never seen a competition in Macau with these rules, these are more international standards. I hope to see people taking more than just a beautiful image ”.