I am a huge fan of Taiwanese breakfast food. In the morning, I usually grab something from a nearby breakfast spot and then spend some time in cafes around my area reading or working on miscellaneous tasks. My day at Lightbox starts at 2 PM and ends at 7 PM, and I work Tuesday to Saturday, so I normally have a good amount of time to wander around in the morning and on my days off. 

While my time at Lightbox looks different week to week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the library is closed, so I usually work on the small tasks I have. During my first week, I spent some time looking through Robert Frank’s photobooks to help with writing English descriptions for the books. For the past two weeks, I have worked on a variety of smaller, research-heavy projects. These include researching different organizations for potential collaborations, writing biographies for artists, and putting together a draft proposal for a youth program that Lightbox may be able to implement in the coming year. 

From Thursday to Saturday, the library is open to the public. While my work largely stays the same on these days, it’s nice to have the background noise of different people shuffling around the library. One day, the library had so many people that my co-interns and I were relegated to sitting outside so that we could chat while doing our work (the temperature ranges from 80-100 degrees Fahrenheit here. Not to even mention the HUMIDITY… very fun, nonetheless). 

While this is what the normal day looks like for me at the physical Lightbox space, I have had many unconventional days so far. This past weekend, we returned back to host a program with Youth Voice Taiwan at their program space. From 9 AM to 5 PM, we worked with high school students on deciding their Youth Perspective awardee for Lightbox’s ongoing photography competition. These were the same students from the weekend programming we had a couple of weekends ago, so it was really cool to see them take what they learned from our first session and use that to inform their final choice. My supervisors and I were beyond surprised with what they ended up choosing for the Youth Perspective award, but that’s democracy for you. 

In the time since my first post, I have also had two more work-mandated days off to visit museums! Not exactly the normal day to day but a fun way that I’ve spent some of my time here!

During my time at Lightbox, I have been exploring the idea of post-photography and media production in a “post-photographic” time: essentially, what does it mean to make and create media in a time where this media can be very realistically generated by tools like AI? I was first introduced to the idea through the talk with Natasha Chuk that was hosted during my first week in Taipei, but have been exploring it as a side research project since then. Being surrounded by photography books all day has made me feel inspired to challenge the notion that we are truly in a post-photographic time, but this is something I am working towards properly dismantling by doing further research. As someone who has been making (new terminology I’m embracing from all of this photography research) photos for almost 7 years now, I never really thought about the history of photography and the theory of it beyond what reading blurbs at art museums has taught me. I am quite literally surrounded by 6,000 books showcasing photographic art / discussing its practice for 35 hours a week: it would be a shame to not think about it a bit more beyond just being a photographer myself.  

Highlight reel: average of 13,000 steps per day, three day trips outside of Taipei (Taoyuan, Tainan, and Jiufen!), and tried my first Taiwanese pizza (Japanese Seafood Takoyaki,,, from Pizza Hut).