The first time Lin Boshan had a strong urge to photograph a game was when he was playing The Elder Scrolls 5.
While walking through the endless snow of Skyrim, Lin suddenly felt something that was hard to capture, so he simply grabbed his camera and took a few pictures of the screen.
(Lin Boshan, Untitled, material taken from The Elder Scrolls 5)
This behavior may seem a bit strange at first glance, as even the most avid players, when trying to explain a game, use screenshots rather than anything else. But in Lin's opinion, a mere screenshot does not reflect his experience of that moment in The Elder Scrolls 5.
When the landscapes of Skyrim, rendered by graphics cards, formed a digital signal that projected onto the screen, it had to pass through air and haze to be seen by human eyes, with all the added reflections and scattering.
"While touring Skyrim, I forgot about all the fighting and tasks and was drawn into the tiny sandbox by the snowy mountains and glaciers of the north. I sought to blur the border between game and reality, thus ignoring the monsters and only pressing the shutter of my camera against the screen when the image matched the experience, in homage to a certain tradition of landscape photography, where the mere movement of pixels in the screen also made me as excited as if I were marching through the snow."
Lin's latest work, the Empire, extracted images from Hearts of Iron IV and Victoria II. Both games are crudely modeled, and the screenshots are essentially just a battlefield map. Yet in these grand strategy games, where the lives and deaths of millions of people are just a number, Lin used scaling and collaging to find out if the characters, underneath the glory of war and historical decisions, have ever looked out of the screen for a moment.
(Lin Boshan, Empires)
"I wanted to find human expressions on their faces, human emotions – a sense of death, a fear of death. I wanted to prove that NPCs, essentially the projections of the morality of the player's ego, could have some of their own selves. I always thought it would be nice to shake them awake."
Deng Jieyu, who studied graphic design and photography in the UK, tried another way of bridging the gap between the virtual and reality.
For his NPC series based on the game Red Dead Redemption 2, he printed out the in-game photos and then processed them until they looked like ancient photos. The process involves varied treatments: sometimes Deng Jieyu soaks paper and fabric of different qualities in coffee, then dries them according to the aging needs; sometimes he uses the intaglio printing process, first printing the photographs on iron plates and then applying ink to transfer them to the processed paper.
And in the Untitled series, Deng Jieyu recycles many second-hand slides and collages them with photos printed on sulfuric acid paper, making these in-game photos look like old photos from a hundred years ago.
(Deng Jieyu, NPC and Untitled)
(Deng’s vintage slides collection)
Deng's first attempt at game photography was in Fallout 4. At first, he took screenshots directly from the game, but the repeated images made him feel too similar to other online images, which was a bit boring for him. In his second attempt, he used CE modifier to unlock the perspective limitation in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, brought the “perspective" he used in real life into his work, and then found his own expression language.
(Deng Jieyu, Ashina)
Lin Boshan is the founder of HAKUCHI, a Chinese online community that focuses on contemporary photography. In the beginning, HAKUCHI's intention was to be an archive, introducing contemporary photographers and works, both well-known and unknown, to the Chinese audience.
But as the community has evolved over the past four years, HAKUCHI now wants to speak out a little more and experiment with something new. Along with these intentions, HAKUCHI has developed more online and offline activities, and game photography is one of HAKUCHI's most distinctive endeavors.
This activity comes from two thoughts of Lin: Is there a difference in the perspective of different players in the same "public space"? Does the virtual world bring new landscapes and stories? In the past few years, Lin Boshan, Deng Jieyu, and many other like-minded friends have used their strong curiosity to explore a series of different game photography themes. Their works have been selected and included in HAKUCHI's "Call for Game Photography“ series.
(Yang Aili, Lover, materials from Cyberpunk 2077)
(Ma Zixiang, /hud off, materials from Special Force 2)
(Wu Jingwen, Artificial Dust, materials from Sims series)
(Yan Xiangning, Unreal, materials from Assassin's Creed Origins)
Mainstream games are more or less tinged with a bit of heroic romanticism. No matter how challenging the tasks are, there is always a way for the protagonists to get a relatively happy ending, and normally, game photography or game screenshots are created around this sentiment.
But outside the spotlight of the main plot, the game has a lot more to offer. The game's interactions may, at times, transcend the design intent and create stories that are significant for the players themselves. Just like in Minecraft, a long dark cave adventure is exhausting, but the moment you return to the surface, sunlight fills the entire screen while music plays in the background. Many players will feel that there is something about this moment that transcends the game itself, yet is difficult to describe in any words.
And this is exactly the feeling that the artists of HAKUCHI wanted to capture.
We talked to Lin and Deng about their work. Lin jokingly said that as soon as he treated The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim like a walking simulator rather than anything else, he captured a completely different side of the protagonist's journey. He used a light spell to illuminate an entire forest, and all he saw was one animal corpse after another. Perhaps the protagonist living at the time will be used to the death in front of him, but for the players living in the modern world in front of the screen, it is difficult not to be awed and touched by the bitterly cold world of the far north.
(Lin Boshan, Unitited)
For Deng, it is the NPCs that caught his attention. The NPCs in both Fallout and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice have an incredible sense of detachment as they follow the dialogue in the game. Yet, their stiff movements and expressions are disconnected from the world they live in, reminding Deng Jieyu of his own socially awkward self.
For Lin and Deng, the essence of their game photography lies in one thing: to break through the established perspective of game designers and to give the images a personal interpretation. Whether people call their works photography or screenshots, there are no differences; so long as the works express personal emotions and ideas, they are worth creating.
The history of game photography is not short. As early as 2006, New York gallery Postmasters exhibited Eva & Franco Matters' portrait photography in the game Second Life.
The Chinese artist Cao Fei also used Second Life as a medium to create a virtual persona called China Tracy and used the photography and recording of the game's characters and props to create the iconic works of her career: i Mirror and RMB City. There are also artists like Lu Yang who explore the subtle intersection of game and reality by combining game design and avatars.
(Cao Fei, i Mirror)
(Lu Yang, DOKU – Digital Alaya)
Just as photography’s artistic value was questioned at its inception, game photographers are facing a lot of criticism about their existence: What is the difference between game photography and a random screenshot? Can taking pictures of a 3D model still be considered creative? The materials in the game are all from other artists' creations, is this type of collage also considered an art form?
Both Lin and Deng have thought deeply about these questions.
"Sometimes the process of game photography is like music sampling," Deng says, "and some of the questions audiences have about our work are like the attitudes listeners had about rap music in the early years." Sampling, widely used in contemporary music, is to use existing musical material, such as old classics, reorganized and broken down as a "beat" for backgrounds.
There is much discussion about the commercial and ethical aspects of this technique, and there are valid arguments on both sides, but in general, society today tends to approve of this appropriation of ready-made material. The sampling of rap music can be seen as musical composition, the use of ready-made codebases by programmers can be seen as programming labor, and then the re-editing and re-creation of game material can certainly be seen as a form of photography.
Photography in the real world is undoubtedly an action that requires a great deal of physical labor. But photography in games is not easy either. Games are precisely designed products, and stepping outside of their framework requires creativity and technical assistance. The use of programming, mods to change the perspective, or even directly unpacking the game material to recreate a certain scene can all be seen as a new type of physical labor.
"Some types of photography, such as war photography and wildlife photography, are relatively distant for general photographers, but game photographers can go through the game to reproduce and pay tribute to those traditions, consciously or unconsciously continuing something." When Lin put traditional photography together with the game photography he received in the call for submissions, he realized that people inevitably bring some bias when looking at game photography. "Many landscapes in the real world look good in themselves, yet they are also relatively fixed, and many people actually shoot the same things from the same angles. People can easily identify with real-life architecture photographers and landscape photographers, but there are more suspicions about the creations of game photographers."
(Above: George Shiras III’s wildlife photography, Below: Lin Boshan, Untitled)
(Above: Thomas Struth, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, East Jerusalem; Below:Dong Fulin, Binary Landscapes, materials from Battlefield V)
(Above: Luigi Ghirri, Orbetello; Below: Panda, Touring Wuzhi Mountain, materials from The Stanley Parable)
(Above: Martin Parr, The Louvre; Below: Xie Rui, Jerry, Jerry, materials from GTA5)
Many of HAKUCHI's photographers are pioneers from the perspective of game photography, but not without precedent from contemporary photographers. As one of the most ‘rebellious’ members of the Düsseldorf School of Photography, German photographer Thomas Ruff released a series of works called "Jpegs". He directly used ready-made news footage, enlarged them to the scale of pixel blocks, and gave a new connotation to the images. Lin's "Empire" can be said to be in the same vein in terms of creative approach.
(Above：Wolfgang Tillmans，Concorde；Middle, Lin Boshan, Empires；Below：Thomas Ruff，Jpegs)
Deng's most recent work focuses on the NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077. These characters, with elaborate backstories created by the designers, carefully produced outfits and dresses that match their identities and personalities, and various hidden snippets of information describing their lives, exist only for the short seconds of interaction with the player. Most of the time, these NPCs are just the game's backdrop. But when Den's camera focuses on them, it is as if he has captured countless stories waiting to be told.
(Deng Jieyu, NPC)
It reminds people of Alec Soth’s work. Alec Soth's subjects often have a "real-life NPC" feel to them as well. Love letters are a classic subject for him, and people seem willing to share these extremely tender and intimate personal memories with him.
(Alec Soth， Love Letter: Would You Come Home?)
This letter is like the diary and letters that are scattered by those NPCs in the game who have no way to talk. A few fragments put together an ordinary but unique life.
(Above: Alec Soth，Sleeping By The Mississippi; Below: Deng Jieyu, Untitled)
Despite the controversy over game photography in one way or another, it is undeniable that game photography has become an essential part of gaming, and a fully functional photography mode has even become an important selling point for many games, and most gamers are happy to share their experiences in games on social media in the form of screenshots.
(the author and a friend in Animal Crossing: New Horizon)
HAKUCHI's Call for Game Photography is now in its fourth year. Initially, the call was a simple discussion of virtual public spaces: what perspective would different players use to view the same landscape? But as the experiment continued, it became clear that the call touched on the most controversial aspects of game photography: the ambiguous distance between game and reality, the empathy and antagonism between players and characters, and the attempt to find the boundaries of photography as an art form through the controversial form of the game itself.
Although the artistry of game photography is often questioned, the creators of HAKUCHI have surprisingly inherited the most fascinating form and will of photography.
And outside of games, the discussion of game photography has gradually moved into more specialized areas. The Photographers' Gallery in London has been running a series of lectures and workshops on online spaces photography called Screen Walks, since 2020, with many pioneering discussions.
In addition to professional artists giving instruction for taking better screenshots, there is even an artist who has created an NPC photographer bot who roams around GTA5, programmed to refuse to participate in missions and to take out his phone, rather than pick up a weapon, to take street shots when things go wrong.
(From online workshop Screen Walk with GTA V Photographer Bot)
After a while, the criticism of game photography’s ‘authenticity’ will become a weak echo from ancient times. As early as 1974, Hiroshi Sugimoto came to the Museum of Natural History in New York to photograph the dioramas and published his works under the same name. These works are as elusive as game photography, which is a mixture of the real and the virtual, but according to Hiroshi Sugimoto: "The moment the virtual images are captured by the camera, they become real."
It is not the physical criterion that determines whether a work is "real" or not, but whether the viewer can be touched by the image when they look at the work and finally see the human nature and thoughts outside the image that the author wants to present.
(Hiroshi Sugimoto, Diaroma)