Lifetime in Image
February-March, 2024
Words Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba
Name: William Yang.
Born: Mareeba, Queensland.
Lives: Sydney.
Known for: Social photographer of subcultures; Sydney’s gay scene, investigations of Chinese jheritage, performance art and handwritten reminiscence text on prints.
Reading: Killing for Country by David Marr, Robyn Davidson's Unfinished Woman and The Best American Essavs edited bv Alexander Chee.
William Yang’s studio is his home in the southern Sydney suburb of Wolli Creek. As you walk through the doorway of his apartment, you’re greeted by a Daoist shrine bearing offerings of fruit and incense. Opposite is a balcony bursting with a Babylonian garden that is visible from the quiet street below. What you can’t fail to notice once inside is the photography paraphernalia everywhere.
As the author Benjamin Law noted, this home-cum-studio ‘houses William’s endless photos, negatives, proof sheets, scanners, memory cards and cameras. You worry what would happen in a house fire. Shouldn’t all this treasure be in an air-conditioned archive in a library somewhere?’
In the middle of the apartment Yang keeps one clear table to lay out his work. This ‘work engine’, as he calls it, is a recent addition. ‘All my other tables are, as you can see, cluttered with unfinished work. I was pasting all my cuttings into scrapbooks, and I just ran out of energy. It’s been like that for months.’
At 80, his life’s work is being sorted through, with the help of the State Library of NSW archivists, following the purchase of a sample of his photographs from the 1970s as a retrospective for World Pride in early 2023.
He smiles as he thinks about this process. ‘Most of the photographs they deal with, the photographers are already dead. It’s unusual, for them, to have a photographer that’s still living provide information about prints or negatives.’
This idea of a life’s work has personal resonance for Yang. Some photographers leave a mess of mouldy negatives, but without any dates or details it’s a pile of would-be photographs that mean little to anyone else.
Yang had this experience when his brother Alan died and he had to pack up his house. ‘A lot of it meant something only to him. So I had to just ruthlessly throw them into the skip, and say “I’m sorry but your value died when your owner died”.’
Born William Young on 19 November 1943, the photographer reshot his name in 1983 when he became Daoist, or ‘born again Chinese’, as he jokes. ‘It’s like reinventing yourself. You do have to make an effort to change your name. You have to tell people, “I’m not Willie Young anymore. I’m William Yang.” The point of it is, you do become a different person.’
It’s just one of his many reinventions. Born in Mareeba in North Queensland, he grew up in Dimbulah, a smaller town 100km inland from Cairns. It was multicultural due to European migrants working in the tobacco industry. High school in Cairns was the worst time of his life, he recalls. People used to call him names.
He moved to Brisbane to study architecture at The University of Queensland. He started writing plays, directing architecture reviews and joined the Brisbane Art Society. Life was better but he was still in the closet.
When he moved to Sydney in 1969 he was finally able to come out as a gay man. ‘That was the biggest change in my life. I was able to come out in a town where I didn’t have a past history. In a new town reinventing yourself is a lot easier.’
He turned to photography in 1974 and earned a living taking snaps for social pages for magazines and newspapers. He photographed life on the gay scene and this turned into a pot of photogenic gold. In 1977, his first exhibition Sydneyphiles showcased the rainbow scene at Paddington’s now shuttered Australian Centre for Photography.
Yang made the switch to digital cameras more than 20 years ago, so his pictures develop not in an atmospheric dark room but on a computer screen. He leads the way through his apartment into the study. It’s here, among the shelves of archives, negatives and bric-a-brac, that he turns his camera to me.
‘I’m just noticing that there’s very good light here, so I’ll take your photo. Can you just face looking out (the window) but eyes to me.’
Click click.
‘That’s good. You can smile.’
Click click.
It’s instantly disarming and after he snaps a couple of pics, he hands me his camera and I have a go at taking his photo.
‘Just engage it, look through the viewfinder.’
Click click. He checks.
‘It’s not bad.’
Yang’s photographs of life on the town include artists such as Brett Whiteley and Patrick White and dear friends like Peter Tully, David McDiarmid, Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee. The photos of them at Flamingo Park parades, precursors to the Mardi Gras, are raucous, vivacious and unpretentious. They make you want to be there.
He still photographs parties now and then but thinks ‘the heyday of the party was the 1980s.
I must confess that whenever I go to a party, I always think “Oh, I’ve seen this before only better.” It’s just not new or fresh. I’m reaching an age where it’s an effort, really, to strap on the cameras and go out again. But if I’m feeling it’s part of an evolving story, then I’m motivated to do it.’
Yang is busily preparing an exhibition for the 24th Biennale of Sydney. We head downstairs to a lock-up garage for a sneak peek of some of the pictures. He had steel shelves installed to store his work ahead of its transport to the Boiler House at White Bay Power Station in Rozelle.
The Biennale curators Inti Guerrero and Cosmin Costinaș showed some of Yang’s pieces when they were working in Hong Kong. They particularly liked his photographs of the early days of the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre (AIDT). Yang remembers he first photographed the performers on stage at the Opera House in the 1970s and after that ‘became officially their unofficial photographer’. He has a large collection of work centred on AIDT. He is seeking permission from the dancers to display their photographs, some of which have not been shown before.
His second project for the Biennale focuses on the 1922 murder of his uncle Fang Yuen. ‘The person who shot him was acquitted of first-degree murder’, Yang says. ‘I’ve drawn the conclusion that killing a Chinaman wasn’t considered a serious crime.’
Yang went to the Innisfail courthouse in Queensland and found documents from the trial, including a police sketch of the murder and a record of the weight of cane loaded in trucks bound for the sugar mill. Fang Yuen was holding the latter when he died and Yang presumes he and the killer argued about the cargo. ‘The slightly macabre thing is that his real blood is on this document. It’s a kind of brown crystalline stain.’
Yang started presenting his art as performance pieces in the late 1980s. Sadness 1992 is the one he regards as his most powerful work. It touches on his murdered uncle and, throwing forward, the 1980s AIDS crisis, where he candidly shows behind-the-scenes, unguarded moments, such as the hospitalisation, deterioration and death of his ex-boyfriend Allan Booth. The impact is devastating.
In the 1990s, Yang started writing on his photographs: succinct sentences, more or less as a caption, often in the negative space or along contours of bodies. They pull you close, creating a parasocial relationship. Like a one-sided embrace. For Yang it’s a way of reminiscing, revisiting and remixing the past.
In one of his performance pieces, he talked about his mother’s will, which angered her because ‘in her generation people didn’t talk about their wills’. Indeed, he remembers she was against him talking about the family in general.
‘She kind of clammed up on me. So it hasn’t been easy for me to talk about my family. It’s been a bit of a battle. Some people in the older generation don’t want to draw attention to themselves, to become a target, whereas the younger generation on social media is more supportive of Asian representation.’
Yang has relatives in Brisbane and Cairns,
but his main relatives are his nephews who live in California. He and his partner Scott Grimmett make a Christmas visit to the US every
second year.
‘We get on really well, we just feel close with the nephews and since my brother and my sister have passed on, they’re my closest relatives. They’re coming over to Australia next month, which is a really big deal.’
In the 2013 documentary William Yang: My Generation, the artist concludes, ‘I’ve spent quite a lot of time on my photos. Devoted my life to them, you might say. They require a lot of attention, like children. And like the children I never had, they’ll tell my stories when I’m gone.’
That thought came to mind as I packed up to leave. Yang beckoned me over and opened a copy of Seeing and Being Seen, the 2021 book published in tandem with his exhibition of the same name. He wrote a note in it and handed it to me as a parting gift.
As I walked to my car I pondered Yang’s lifelong dedication to his craft. It felt spiritual, informed by his Daoist beliefs. I looked back at his building and thought of him being returned to his creative solitude.
Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba is a freelance journalist and podcast producer