Spectacular Travel Photography by Max Wong

I am lucky enough to have travelled extensively throughout my life. All credit here due to my mother, who, whenever I have more than a few days’ break at school, would never ask me, “What do you want to do?”, but “Where do you want to go?”

But perhaps even more luckily, I have learned to value travel. Here is the most cliché phrase of the century: the world is so big. Not big. Incredibly huge. You think that China is huge because it takes up a lot of space on a map and has more than a billion people in it?

Wait until you go to somewhere like Xinjiang, and experience that people there are not remotely Han Chinese with the Asian faces; that they are Uighurs who really are turbaned Muslim Turks and who carry daggers so sharp you can shave with them; that you cannot find any food that isn’t mutton for miles in a city. Then you realise that China recognises 56 such diverse minority groups.

Then, again, you realise that China is only one country of the 192 recognised by the UN, which by the way does not even include Taiwan. It isn’t about diplomats shaking hands with each other for people to see on television. It isn’t about newspaper columnists debating about whether Gaddafi will finally respond to the West. England, is so incredibly small.

The United States, is so incredibly small. Yet we live in it, and think it is so big. Travelling, travelling, is the most humbling experience, bar none. And it is different for everyone. As for me, having spent so much time in Europe, nothingness in itself was something to see. The desolation of destitute Hebbronville in South-Central Texas was more exciting to me than any intricacies that the Tower of London can ever offer me.

Vision is only one of five senses. I would be utterly presumptuous if I claimed that I captured the “what it’s like to be in Antarctica” in a million pictures, let alone so few displayed here. But in some of my photographs, I do try and lead our minds to wonder and fill in the experience: the smell of Turkish spices, the serenity of Antarctica, the energy of Capoeira dancers in Brazil. I also hold a childish but not unwarranted sense of wonder.

I wonder at small things like the beautiful detail of the flaking paint on a door with a lock chain, and imagine how every bit of the missing paint fell off. But most of the time, I take a photograph simply because I think it makes a beautiful image. Very rarely do I pretend to capture anything “sophisticated”, like the all-time favourite “profound mixture of cultures and races”.

Now, you may ask, what do you mean by beauty? I answer this as no philosopher ever should - give a tautology. An image is not beautiful because it follows the “rule of thirds”. An image is not beautiful because it has fifteen million colours in the same frame, or because it has some “profound” subject.

We should stop rationalising everything - human emotion and feelings simply do not work that way. An image is beautiful because it is beautiful to you, and it is pleasing to your eye. If it isn’t pleasing to your eye, no devout following of the “rule of thirds” is going to rescue anything.

It is highly unfortunate that I chose to bring up the example of Xinjiang, since I have no pictures of Xinjiang in this exhibition, because I sadly did not manage to take good photographs while I was there. But I hope you enjoy what you see. It has been my life and blood for the last two weeks.

All works in this article are by Max Wong. A booklet of the exhibition is being presently printed, and can be available by request. If you wish to buy a print, that is also possible by request. Contact e-mail: maxwong@fas.harvard.edu