Julian Stallabrass (JS) in Conversation with Anthony Lam (AL), 2007.

JS: So we’re here to talk about a new piece, a new portfolio of prints by Anthony, which is a striking kind of physical object — it is produced in this rather luscious red box, and when you open it up you see red ribbons and black covering card, on the box is written the title eat bitterness and once you get inside and start looking at the prints they show scenes of a considerable dereliction: of filth, staining, spattering, erasure and so on. So first to ask you about the title, eat bitterness. I know it’s a phrase but what does it mean?

AL: eat bitterness is pointing to this sense that it is China and the history of China. And in a sense eat bitterness is… as a nation in China you were supposed to endure hardship, for the good of the nation. So, therefore, they went through the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, one-child policy, and things like this, social things and political things. And I am trying to point towards that and give the images and the work some context and some subtext really […] But now of course, eat bitterness now in modern-day China, has been kind of used to, as an admirable spirit. That, as a new entrepreneur you can, you know, you may endure some hardships but of course you’re always gonna make some money, and be a new man or a new woman. So there is that sense yeah.

JS: Let’s talk about the textual elements here. There’s a newspaper where there are various erasures — so again to blank out all mention of place — and then there’s a quote from Umberto Eco about fundamental misidentifications, of for instance unicorns for rhinoceroses. Can you tell us more about that kind of veiling of your intention, and veiling of place and the way that these texts relate to your pictures?

AL: It is also about my own history with photography and my sense of going to another place and being a tourist in that place and an outsider. And about the things that you see before you which of course have been played in your mind before by the imagery coming out or about that place. And I guess I wanted to use this particular quote to try and put you in that position, where maybe you should try and reconfigure or rethink your own perceptions, which could be preconceived by media or other types of places or works… This is from a Financial Times article that I found on the tube maybe about ten years ago. And I always kept it because I wanted to do something with it, at some point and it is about China, so the whole thing is about the modernization of China. And I have kind of crossed out those references to place. And it does mention one particular place in the north of China, which drove the project in the end, and in fact, that was the whole reason for going to China, to go to this one place and to kind of do a collaboration with other people in China around this place […] It was actually quite an uninteresting place, it was a kind of postindustrial new town that had a lot of history to it, but as a visitor, there wasn’t actually much to see, whatever that means, but it was interesting to go to because it happened after I had done the photography in Shanghai. And so what was interesting it actually gave me space to think about the images I made in Shanghai and see whether they made any sense with the whole point of being in China. Actually in Shanghai, I had never really been that interested to go to, for me in China I was more interested in going to the interior, in going to the north-west, and the south-west, I had been to Beijing, a few times before. And I wasn’t interested and I’m not really interested in this whole idea of the new China.

JS: Well sure, and there’s a dramatic contrast between the economic boosterism of the Financial Times clipping, and your images, which, except for the very last one, are absolutely about places where that kind of wave of economic regeneration hasn’t reached.

AL: Of course there is this sense that there is a lot of coverage, a lot of slippage, between the old and the new, and when I went to this hotel in this other place, it was funny I arrived at about half past midnight, when I woke up in the morning, I came down the stairwell, and interestingly the first flight of stairs in this stairwell were completely new, tiled over, looking very clean and modern. And then you find that all the other stair threads above the first flight were all completely bare concrete. And it was as if in some sense the old and the new, and as if there was this sense that we project a certain image to those outside but of course we have our own image of ourselves.

JS: If one goes to [a recently capitalist place such as] Moscow now for instance, you see many of those old 1960s, 1970s massive Soviet apartment blocks and the same wide avenues and the same bleakness, basically, on the outskirts anyway, but with a few little bits of neon on the front as a sort of veneer, and there is very much that sort of feeling when travelling in eastern Europe soon after the wall came down that there is this sort of apparatus of commercialization [which] is beginning to move in, but it only seems to be done in a sort of provisional and cack-handed manner. And it is almost a kind of education in a way, the evolving of capitalist aesthetics, or something of that sort.

AL: It doesn’t seem planned, it seems like the people on the ground get in the way. So it’s quite interesting. And I found that in Shanghai actually although supposedly in the last ten years they have built, I don’t know, 5,000 skyscrapers or something like that, something ridiculous, and yet when you’re on the ground, you don’t necessarily feel that. It’s only when you’re in a car, or going through, of course their roadways, some are elevated, that’s when you start feeling it, or when you go on the fastest train in the world, that’s when you really realize it, but of course when you are on the fastest train in the world going to the airport, which takes eight minutes from the centre to the airport, which takes an hour in a car, you’re looking down and you’re seeing all these paddy fields, so it’s that kind of contrast and that strangeness and that weirdness, you are kind of part of it and not part of it.

JS: There is one sort of striking narrative moment in here, which is with the last image, having gone through these various images of as I say, filth and erasure and so on, we get to finally a piece of clean modernity, with perhaps slight relief — something which is, it could be anywhere this image.

AL: As most of the images could be, of course.

JS: But nevertheless this piece certainly sits in contrast with the others, so I just wondered if you could talk about that narrative break.

AL: As you were saying there is not necessarily a narrative which kind of goes from A to B to C to D within the set. But then at the end there is like this punchline. This full stop. Which then makes you think, well maybe I should go back, and go through the images again. Because of course looking through the images, you start to think well, they are all of things that are degrading, they are all of material that has maybe been discarded. You know, what does this all mean? And then towards the end you get this punchline, or the full stop, and then maybe it’s about going back, and refiguring, remaking the idea or the set, trying to work it out. But of course the whole point is that it is quite ambiguous.

JS: So we shouldn’t see this final image of a rather clean and sanitized modernity as a full stop, as a final destination then? 

AL: You could see it that way. I mean the whole thing about photography for me, and I’m not trying to be disingenuous, but it is… You bring what you want to it and for me that is interesting. I am always interested in what people think about photography, not necessarily my photography, but just about photography and how they read it.

JS: That sort of brings us to issues of style, in a way, and, certainly [for those] people who are familiar with your earlier work, perhaps particularly Notes from the Street (1995), although it is far from being an entirely straight or typical piece of documentary photography, nonetheless the style there was fairly straightforward, black and white documentary style. And [eat bitterness] seems to be closer if anything to a sort of rather begrimed William Eggleston, or something of that sort. I was wondering if you could talk about that shift?

AL: Well, Notes from the Street was ’95 when it came out but the actual photography was ’93. And that work was very much about these young people who felt very marginalized, on the edges, and in some sense, it was the back view of a part of London. And in that sense there is some similarity with this new body of work because it is also a back view: it is not a front view, it is not the centred view, it is the decentred view. And I think that kind of pervades through some of my work, that I don’t want to show, I don’t want you to be there slap bang in the middle of that action, it is trying to sort of seep out towards the edges, and that I think comes from my own background, my own interests. And I’m not so sure that it is driven by the photography, the photography is a reaction to those social interests I think.

JS: There seems to be an anti-pastoral thing going on here, particularly in the erasure or partial erasure of the landscape painting in one of these pictures. And you don’t depict people here, although you have done in China or at least in Hong Kong before. Is that to do with the difficulty of depicting someone who has inevitably some cultural distance with you? Or how would you see that?

AL: During the process of making this work I actually forced myself to go to the train station in Shanghai and spend an afternoon photographing people, which for those that know some of my previous work, and with my history as a photographer, you know, I have photographed a lot of people. But actually, it was really strange because after having photographed most of this body of work, forcing myself to go to the train station and photograph people for an afternoon, I actually stopped doing it and it felt really wrong for that time.

JS: Can you say why?

AL: Because it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, it wasn’t what I wanted to represent or explore, and it felt, I had done it before, previously. I had done many of those pictures previously, I just haven’t shown them.

JS: Talking about, you know, using a compact camera here and that somehow working against your feeling of distance from Shanghai. And there you used a longer lens I guess to put yourself in a sort of false proximity with these people and to capture some quite strange sort of passing expressions on their faces.

AL: Yeah I mean it was trying that out. Trying that sense of being intimate, being in the same space and yet being very distant from it. And seeing what happened really, and spending two weeks on one street corner between two and five every afternoon. And that is how that series of work came about. And of course, it got added to with images of buildings and stuff.

JS: So did people start to recognize you and to talk to you in that place? Did you find yourself getting any closer on that street corner after a while?

AL: No no, I always kept myself very separate.

JS: One of the things that occurred to me, certainly, as I was looking through was that this sense of heavy entropy which is placed over the world, and of these things being in a sense a consequence of neglect but also rapid change. As you say the two are bound up almost dialectically. Which is related to the creative destruction of capitalism, which is felt everywhere but obviously very abruptly and with a great urgency in China. But nevertheless, it points to something quite universal, something we all experience in some sense. And maybe it is just me wanting to find some form of more stable and universal meaning in these but that’s my own kind of kink or fetish. I don’t know whether you have any response to that?

AL: I mean they are very universal and there is that sense that most of these things are things that have been left behind or seemingly left behind, within the process of modernization. But of course, there is that other sense that as individuals we don’t necessarily want to be left behind, we want to be part of a grouping. We want to be seen to be part of the fabric of society, whatever that means. And I don’t know whether these stand for that or not, they could stand for that, I guess one reading maybe.

JS: The portfolio itself is very cagey about your intentions about the place and so on. And you have now spilt the beans; so what effect do you think that has and why have you done that?

AL: I think with anything, once you have made something you have to get it out there, and it is true we could actually have decided not to launch it. But actually to let people know it’s there. Or maybe even posted it to people with nothing, and that would have been interesting but […] how you would get any sense of a feedback or any sense of, well what does that actually mean? Because for me, if someone had this and then gave it to their friend and then their friend gave it to someone else, I’m quite happy with that.

JS: It could become a form of elaborate mail art, rather luxurious mail art.

AL: It could be, and when we were first thinking, well how do we actually process this work, what do we do with it? Our first thinking was to make this oversized postcard, you know really large, ridiculously large, so it would be sent to people and they would have to go to the post office to collect it, and they would go there, make a special effort thinking this is great, and they would be confronted with this large oversized postcard of what? From who? And that was our original idea. And then we went and made this. So maybe we were wrong in the end.