PSA Journal – 1951

Francis Wu’s One-Man Show
Foreign Exhibit

Those who see this show will agree that it is tops in pictorial photography, The Francis Wu One-Man show from Hong Kong.

The Foreign Exhibits are all yours for the asking. Plan ahead; spend the whole evening at your club viewing one of the foreign exhibits. Admire the prints, criticize them! No one will be angry. The makers are too far away!

Realize too that the prints are the work of men and women in far away lands, with different customs, different materials and different viewpoints.

Our shows sent abroad would undergo the same searching scrutiny. Some of our techniques will please and be imitated. Some of our choice of subject of subject matter will amuse and astound. Some of our efforts will fall flat on their face with a thud. Some will inspire them to better work.

Viewing a Foreign Exhibit is similar to travel. The scenes are not like America. The people in the prints look and dress differently. When you see one of Francis Wu’s prints that show an old Chinaman smoking a cigarette down to the last sixteenth of an inch by holding it on a pin, and then looking at a morning after ashtray in your own living room, you will realize what I mean.

Photographers in different lands do not copy our pictures. We cannot copy theirs. Their lands are different. Their people do different things in different ways. But people are the same and photographers all over the world showing sorrowing women, happy children, men intend on their work, ever since photography came along and made it possible to record moods and character and their lives of all of us.

Study those foreign prints. Don’t leaf through the in a hurry. Look at the lands. See how their homes differ from ours. Try to understand why the print was made. If you like it, and you will not like all of them, try to find out why. What does it do to you?

See these foreign shows. Look and learn! Top notch photographers who study a print and what lies back of its making, always learn something, Maybe it is “what not to do” but even that is worth while.