Lightness, Remembered. Life Bookstore.

作品賞析

Life Bookstore is part of Sim Chang’s series, “Lightness, Remembered.” In this series, the shooting locations are all places redolent with a sense of history, and the photographer invites the subject to share memories of the past on the spot. This photo was taken in the old “Life Bookstore” in Yancheng District, Kaohsiung, and the main subject is its boss, now in his nineties. The boss speaks of his rich life experiences with the vividness and exciting quality of a storyteller. He said that he had been a Taiwanese Japanese soldier during the Japanese colonial period, but fortunately the war ended before he went to the battlefield. The man’s face in the photograph is replaced by an electronic screen that shows his portrait when he was 18 years old. Sim Chang asked the boss to recreate the posture he used at 18 when the original photo was taken. Through the combination of the old photo and the present scene, his life story and times are brought on the feather-light medium of film.