it is all in the eyes
Bruce Wang Citizen Wang StudioArticle By Bruce Wang @ citizenwangstudio.com
It is all in the eyes
Play Audio
Kathryn Johnston:
Today's date is 1st of August 2022. This is roughly about half eight, I'm talking to Bruce Wang in Islington about his work as a photographer, starting from looking at the origins of his early works.
Bruce Wang:
Why photograph women?
Kathryn Johnston:
Yeah. Starting with the early origins of your photography, your work over the last seven years in particular. And why, Bruce, photograph women?
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Well, I will reserve why I photograph women to the end of what I say. . I'm trying to think about why I just photograph women. I started my photography career, if you call it that, by photographing other boys in the boarding school I went to. I found that I liked photographing them, just head and shoulder shots, fully dressed with shirt, tie and jacket.
Kathryn Johnston:
Was it a very formal boarding school?
Bruce Wang:
Oh yes. It was Harrow. Very patrician, very conservative, very stuffy. I realized I only like photographing the pretty boys there, my contemporaries. I did it because they looked pretty and they looked like other girls of that age around at the time. I didn't photograph any rugged built cricket heroes because I thought they were boring. I photographed pretty boys which the authorities didn't liked very much, which is one of the things that got me kicked out of Harrow.
Kathryn Johnston:
So rather than a homoerotic interest, it was because there were no girls, there were no girls at Harrow, and this was the closest you could get to female gender at that time.
Bruce Wang:
And at 13, 14, 15, I suffered terribly from the teenage hormone insurgency on my psyche and I was utterly confused. I looked around all the boys in the school, there was no-one interesting that I could relate to. I knew I wanted to have a girlfriend my age, but the only substitutes were boys of that age who looked like girls anyway, or in my mind they did.
Kathryn Johnston:
Oh, it was an all boys school. You didn't even have the luxury of a crush on the teacher then did you?
Bruce Wang:
No. Repulsive teachers.
Kathryn Johnston:
All male I take it.
Bruce Wang:
All male, yeah. I went to Harrow where there was no latent homosexuality. I knew other contemporaries at prep school who went to other boarding schools, Catholic boarding schools, where there was a lot of paedophilia and mutual masturbation by the boys. At one school I heard of, young first years were forcibly held down and masturbated by another boy. So that was that.
Kathryn Johnston:
But that didn't happen in Harrow.
Bruce Wang:
No, no. No, it didn't.
Kathryn Johnston:
And then what about, when you were 12, 13, at the same time, you would've gone home for holidays I presume.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
You were born in Hong Kong. You moved to London when you were 10. You must have met girls. You must have seen girls. You must have obviously seen women, you have sisters. You must have been surrounded by images of women growing up, did you?
Bruce Wang:
Oh yeah. Playboy, occasional porn magazines. I had my first kiss at 15, a snog with another girl a year or two older than me, but I didn't actually lose my virginity till I was about 17, 18.
Kathryn Johnston:
Oh, you were an early starter then.
Bruce Wang:
Early starter, a very late starter. And that was accompanied by a great deal of misery and frustration, which canceled out the novelty of losing my virginity.
Kathryn Johnston:
And have you kept any photographs left of those times?
Bruce Wang:
No, I burnt them all.
Kathryn Johnston:
You burnt them all?
Bruce Wang:
I burnt them all.
Kathryn Johnston:
Deliberately presumably?
Bruce Wang:
Oh yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
Why?
Bruce Wang:
Just one of my mad fits.
Kathryn Johnston:
What disturbed you about them?
Bruce Wang:
I just didn't want any more memories of my miserable childhood.
Kathryn Johnston:
Understandable enough. Yeah.
New Speaker:
I just don't know have any memories, any pictures. I still remember the pictures I had of the girls that I interacted with. And I can see those pictures in my mind, more than any of the over half million pictures since then.
Kathryn Johnston:
So then when you moved on from Harrow and photographing boys and photographing girls, what was the next stage in your photographic life?
Bruce Wang:
Well, I didn't do any more photography when I was 17, 18, it would've been '71, '72. And the guys I was with at university thought it was very uncool to take pictures, to take selfies and group photographs unlike nowadays. I had a camera with me, but all I was interested was... I was in Leeds. I was in a room and looking out the window, I saw that the opposite terrace houses chimney pots in late afternoon light. And I liked the pictures of chimney pots taken from my loft room at late afternoon. This was my early entry into still life and landscape.
Kathryn Johnston:
What I was going to ask you was not why boys, why girls, but why people? As you mentioned there, the chimney pots turned you on. And landscapes, group photographs, that kind of thing. So why people? What was it fascinated to you about representation of people in their lives and their-
Bruce Wang:
The films I'd seen, the Sunday papers, Don McCullin and David Bailey. I thought this was how I wanted to be when I grew up. I must have grown up with the 50 years since then, but I didn't fancy going out to a war zone, the pictures of soldiers fighting or resting or shellshocked. And I really don't see myself as a fashion photographer like Bailey. I came across... So flash forward to four years ago, which is 2018, '17, as in 2015, '16, I was inviting standup comedians from Facebook to pose for me.
Bruce Wang:
I did my portrait apprenticeship then. I had a very cheap camera. The results weren't very good, but some of them were usable. They were quite good pictures. I thought standup comedians were very expressive, had spunk and personality. And that was okay for a while. And then I asked some people on Facebook who were friends and asked some people. And then one day, one woman I photographed, I did some pretty insignificant photograph she was a pretty, an attractive woman of certain age.
Bruce Wang:
And then she just went to the changing room in my flat, the bathroom.. She came dressed in drag with a moustache, bowtie, and her personality was that of a female Les Dawson. I took lots and lots of pictures. Her name was Heather Henriques. I got loads of pictures of her in drag. I thought this is what I want to do. Her character was Richard Dick. I can't remember. S
Kathryn Johnston:
We can check her right later.
Bruce Wang:
We'll check her later.
Kathryn Johnston:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's very interesting that the work that influenced you were the two photographers you mentioned who influenced you were first of all, Don McCullin and David Bailey. And you said you didn't want to do war photography, you didn't want to do fashion photography, but what you did want to do is what they did best, which was to tell a story.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. They had an inner part of themselves which they had nurtured and cultivated in private and for whatever reason about their personality makeup, and now the blatant and very funny and very entertaining and biting satire wit about their performances. And this is about four years or three, four years ago, and I've never looked back. I have on occasion scrolled the endless pages of Facebook and you see all these male ballet dancers dressed only in swimming trunks or whatever they call them. I asked why is this still attractive to see a young male full of muscles prancing around for a photograph and it is because they look like women. And that's why I thought I've got to take more drag kings. Flash forward, and now I'm doing non-binary drag artists to redress the balance,.
New Speaker:
New Speaker:
Kathryn Johnston.
New Speaker:
New Speaker:
so what you are really doing then is you're pushing the envelope, aren't you?
Bruce Wang:
Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
You're expanding the representation of gender, of sexuality.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
Well, I find that very interesting. I'm sitting here in your house and I can see a lot of the examples of your work around. And I mean, I presume these are coming from the last four or five years. They show a wealth of stories, they really do.
Bruce Wang:
Well, I'm a confirmed bachelor and heterosexual. I wouldn't pretend to be non-binary or gay. I just find some women in the... I just find photographs of some women very alluring, interesting, inspirational. On my walls, I had pictures of women who set up the shot themselves and just got someone to press the button. See how they want to be represented by themselves as themselves and lesbian couples who took selfies of them and their partner - very, very beautiful pictures, far more beautiful than anything I've ever taken. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
And then conversely, apart from looking at the photographs and well, I suppose really from following their instructions from looking at them, the way they would like to be seen, you can look at them the ways some other people would see them. You can see stories in their lives, their pictures. I mean, it reminds me of John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
And the kind of storytelling that he did through photographs.
Bruce Wang:
Yes. I could launch into a bit of art history about women being depicted by the old masters from the beginning of time. I could talk about Cindy Sherman and others. Well, that's some other time. My first contact with a proper photographer and a proper woman photographer was Jo Spence. I don't know how I met her.
Kathryn Johnston:
Didn't you make some furniture for her?
Bruce Wang:
I did some carpentry for her. I built her and her partner a platform bed in the kitchen in their tiny Islington flat. And I donated stuff to Camera work the magazine. Although we didn't have that much in common, I found Jo utterly fascinating how you can spend all day editing, photographing. Well, Jo started out as a high street photographer, would do watch the birdie photos with animals and children .
Kathryn Johnston:
Like the equivalent of snappy snaps today.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. And I thought how fascinating. And I was invited to private views of Camerawork magazine, but all the snooty white wine sipping critics, I just had nothing to say. So, I left that scene. This was in 1974, '75.
Kathryn Johnston:
That's a long time ago. Those would've been the days when Brian Sewell was really cornering the market and the art criticism and photographic criticism.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. I didn't really start taking photograph till about 1981, '82, when I embarked disastrously on a furniture designing course. For some reason unknown to me to this day, the lecturers wanted us to... Instead of telling us how furniture was made, what was the best way of constructing a piece of furniture, they wanted us to design furniture to a brief without any experience of furniture making. And one of the things that we had to do was to go from the only the furniture building, wandering Lloyd's building, taking photos of the Lloyd's building, which was just going up then. It was still being built when I first photographed it. And that's what got me in taking lots of street photographs. I didn't last more than a month on furniture.
Kathryn Johnston:
But that's interesting that you mentioned that you lived in Islington. And I mean, Islington has been a great influence on you. I've seen a lot of your photographs. You've got a lot of Islington street photographs.
Bruce Wang:
Yes.
Kathryn Johnston:
As well. And I mean, I think that's interesting that you took photographs of buildings in Islington.
Bruce Wang:
Islington is more than a borough. It's a way of life. Rich socialists and council house Tories. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
All the many diversities. I mean, I was in The Angel, Islington with you yesterday. I was amazed at the diversity. And now I'm talking one particular type of diversity, rich white diversity. There was every kind of fashionista style that was mind blowing. And then when you looked at all the street representations and everything else, it was just obviously such a rich, such a culturally diverse and probably such a productive area for you to live in.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. I'll clarify more just sort of rich and poor. All the rich people who have millions around here in this square where I live. They don't care about the poor, who live in the council houses, all the rich people who vote labour have million pound houses in Islington, and all the council houses vote Tory. That's the irony, that's the beauty of England and Islington.
Kathryn Johnston:
The beauty of England and Islington is the irony and the dark side of England very much, isn't it?
Bruce Wang:
Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
It's this other England, this other Islington, this other London that isn't often represented. And that's what strikes me firstly about your street photographs of Islington, but also about your photographs of lesbian couples and of drag kings. These are people who are quite often, well, Jesus, traditionally, have been hidden from history and they're not given a place and represented about. And that's something that you're very much doing. You're giving them space. You make them visible.
Bruce Wang:
Well, yeah. Before Kings of Drag books one to five available from Amazon came out, there's only one book on drag kings by someone called Volcano, Hermes. That's about 20 years ago in America. The cover is about drag king in cowboy gear with a rifle, a Winchester rifle, dragged across his shoulders. After, there was nothing until I came along, which are publishing classics.
Kathryn Johnston:
As a feminist all my life and somebody who studied images of women and Madonna and sisters doing it for ourselves, all that kind of stuff, I find it really fascinating that until you did these drag king books, I mean, that was a culture or some culture in way you would describe it, how you would see it, an expression of gender that I wasn't aware of. And yet it's something that's very, very stimulating intellectually, I think, as well as in terms of representation. It says awful lot about women and men.
Bruce Wang:
Ah, how I photograph these non-binary/gay women as a reflection of my interaction with straight women, lovers, friends, sisters, mother, I have tremendous respect for women to say the least. I find pictures of women much more interesting than pictures of men.
Kathryn Johnston:
Well, I agree. And I mean, I think with people like... Well, like Jo Spence you mentioned, Susan Sontag.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
I mean, I can identify a lot with what you say because I'm a mother of a gay son. I'm very conscious through the photographs I took of my son when he was growing up of the way in which he saw himself in the way in which he wanted to be pictured, which varied very, very much over the years. And I think that's something that you've really hit on with these drag king books that the truth that you can tell from how we self identify. We're not binary, we're not black and white, none of us are.
Kathryn Johnston:
Living in Ireland, I mean, I know more that more than most. Coming from China, you know that more than most as well. And I think that's the real strength of your work that you give people the space to define themselves.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Like my mother gave me and my late oldest sister, Jocelyn, she actually studied photography at the Guildford School of Art. And she was the one who taught me how to develop prints, develop and print pictures in a dark room. And when I'm editing that, I still think she said, Just cut out the bits that don't show any information or say nothing. Every time I edit a picture, I think of her words. This is from over 50 years ago. Basically, I was taught photography by women.
Kathryn Johnston:
Well, the other big influence on you was your mother who was the woman's editor of the Hong Kong Tiger Standard.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
She must have worked, I mean, the whole centrality of her career must have been the representation of women, whether in the written or spoken word or photographic.
Bruce Wang:
Yes. Yes.
Kathryn Johnston:
And yet she certainly didn't seem to be any kind of common or garden person.
Bruce Wang:
No, she went from being a woman's editor to bringing five children to England buying a house, shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing for five children, three meals a day. This is when she must've been about 40 something.
Kathryn Johnston:
What about your father? He wasn't there at that time?
Bruce Wang:
No, he was a typical fifties father, distant, away a lot. But yeah, to my mother, the one statement she made told me everything. One day we were sitting, reading the paper, she tell me, "Just read the first paragraph and the last paragraph and you’ve got the story here." And we had some other the papers from Saturday, "And you see these? They're dead."
Kathryn Johnston:
At least some are right.
Bruce Wang:
And that was it. That was my entry to journalism and I'll never forget that.
Kathryn Johnston:
Well, that's fantastic because if you don't get everything, you have to get everything, especially on tabloid. Well, in any paper, in any kind of representation or form, you have to get the entire story into the first paragraph and then you have to tell people what they're saying. And then at the end, you have to remind them what they've seen and what's in between is just really to power out the pages for the ads. And it strikes me that the kind of evasion guidance your sister, Jocelyn, gave you, carve out everything unessential.
Bruce Wang:
And they certainly did when it came to dealing with me and my crazy emotions, my hormone balance.
Kathryn Johnston:
Well, it wasn't quite a struggle five children coming from China.
Bruce Wang:
Oh, yes. Hong Kong. Yeah.
Kathryn Johnston:
On her own. Your mother seems to have brought, and obviously from your experience, she's brought all of you up to question and your brother's a very well known jazz musician.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah, Godfrey Wang
Kathryn Johnston:
You've all found your own paths.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. Well, when my father died of cancer about '86, '87, no, '87. Yeah. He offered his multi million pound business empire to my brother. And my brother said, "I don't want to be a millionaire businessman. I want to play my piano." And he suggested to my father that he should keep all his money and enjoy the rest of his life.
Kathryn Johnston:
Which is a good philosophy to live by.
Bruce Wang:
Yeah. My brother, he prides himself on never having given a piano lesson for his income and salary. His entire income has been from playing the piano.