hotographer William Yang found his artistic niche relatively late in life—he was in his forties when he performed his first photo-monologue (which is akin to one of those old-fashioned holiday photo slideshows except not boring and shown in a theater instead of your uncle’s living room). Both a visual artist and a writer, Yang graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor’s of Architecture, spent five years as a playwright, and then worked as a freelance photographer. This artistic versatility led him to express himself through novel methods.

Yang displays his photography on two projector screens, often with musical accompaniment, and relates stories which he describes as “part travelogue, part diary.” Heis the first artist to approach photography in this manner. “It’s a unique form, so people have complex reactions,” Yang said in a telephone interview. He found that presenting his work as monologues allowed him to better engage his audience. His work “Shadows” was performed at the Hop as part of the Class Divide programming initiative, and it was his first non-autobiographical work. It deals with an aboriginal community in Southern Australia and the German settlers who were interned during the two World Wars. “Shadows” is a production about both the aboriginals’ reconciliation with white Australians and the Germans’ reconciliation with the wider Australian community. Yang travelled to the two communities and in “Shadows,” he relates his personal experiences through thought-provoking, often humorous anecdotes. At the climax of the performance, he recounts his visit to the site of an aboriginal massacre and showed a powerful photo of the bones of a child’s hand against the dusty orange ground.

At his Dartmouth lecture entitled “About Photography,” he explained how his camera lens helped him come out both as a gay man and as an Australian-born-Chinese. He first thought about his sexual orientation in high school when he read a newspaper article on the “homosexual condition.” “The shock of recognition hit me like a thunderbolt,” he said, “and I thought, ‘Oh God, there’s a name for it.’” He did not know any gay students in his high school and often felt like he was carrying around a dark secret. “I thought there were four homosexuals in the world,” he said, “Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, Michaelangelo, and ME.” He didn’t consciously come out until’69 when he moved to Australia and began his career as a freelance photographer. He gained recognition as a photographer through his candid coverage of gay life in Sydney in his first solo exhibit “Sydneyphiles” in’77. Another of his performances, “Sadness (1992)” covered the spreading of AIDS in the gay community and the slow decline of his friend Allan’s health.

Twelve years after he came to terms with his sexual orientation, Yang began to embrace his cultural heritage. “People called me born-again Chinese,” he said, “which had a certain amount of zealousness.” As a third-generation Chinese man in Australia, he and his brother never learned how to speak their mother’s dialect, Cantonese. “My mum thought that being Chinese was a complete liability,” he said. Yang’s reconciliation with his heritage marked the beginning of a number of visits to China and the production of a project simply entitled “China” which told stories of the Chinese diaspora.

When asked if he considered himself a political artist, he answered that he cared more about how he told a story rather than setting out to intentionally be political. He doesn’t see himself as an activist; but sees political undertones and intention in his some of his works. Through experiences being marginalized as an artist, a gay man, and person, he gravitated towards giving voices to other marginalized communities. He ended his lecture, a journey through pictures and the reconciliation with his identity, on a Zen-like note with an announcement of his happiness with his current life.