| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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HERE AT THE ACADEMY Dong Lin, Fearless Photographer
The Cultural Revolution was surging through China when Dong Lin’s father gave him his first camera. Dong, just nine years old, was captivated. With no affordable processing labs, he had to find a way to develop and print his own photographs. After saving his pocket money for a few years by eschewing all snacks, he managed to save 25 yuan, a month’s salary for an average worker, and enough to buy a lens for a homemade enlarger to make prints. His college offered no decadent courses in photography, but there was an unofficial camera club where he could hone his future trade, and around the time of his graduation, Dong won a nationwide photo contest. Impressed by his work, the prestigious Chinese Photographers Association invited him to join their organization, and he soon found work with a newspaper, a magazine, and an advertising agency—all at the same time. It’s a momentum the Academy’s photographer has kept up ever since. Dong and his camera were present during the debacle at Tiananmen Square. Shortly afterwards it became prudent for him to explore other horizons. He found a sponsor in the United States, sold all his possessions to afford the ticket and, he says, “arrived in this country with no money, no camera, and no English.” Like all true artists, he began his career in America as a dishwasher, progressed to waiter, bought a camera, his now beloved Leica, and was back on track. After a stint as a technician in a photo lab in San Francisco, in 1992, Dong heard about a part-time job at the California Academy of Sciences making black-and-white prints. When the assistant photographer left three years later, he was promoted to replace her. The timing was perfect. Within two months the Academy’s chief photographer had resigned and Dong moved into the top position. That same month he started a master’s degree in fine art and began putting together a book, One American Reality, a photographic record of the down-and-out in New York and San Francisco. It was published the following fall. That year also saw an exhibit of his work at the Center for Photography at the University of California at Berkeley, which in turn led to his first return visit to China as the still photographer with a PBS Frontline team in Tibet. Today, Dong is a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and was recently invited as a “promising leader” to an international symposium on “Creative Leadership in Economics, Arts and Science” in Switzerland.The usual responsibilities of the Academy photographer are to document the exhibits and the education program, record the in-house research, photograph the major events for the marketing and public relations department, and act as a consultant for everyone on staff with a photographic problem. But Patrick Kociolek, the new Executive Director, envisaged a wider, more significant, and far more taxing role for the staff photographer. He should accompany Academy scientists on their expeditions to study the fauna and flora in foreign lands. For Dong, whose primary experience had been photographing people, this would be especially difficult. But as you can imagine, it’s not a challenge that this photographer is likely to duck. In the three years since his first trip, he has been to Madagascar twice, Myanmar five times, China, and the islands of São Tomé and Principé in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea. Above all, natural history photography in the field takes patience, whether it’s spending days quietly waiting for a bird or large mammal to come within range, or setting up a studio shot in a soaking wet tent or makeshift, leaf-roofed hut and cajoling an uncooperative insect to pose. Dong’s forte is the latter. He can spend hours bent double, flash in one hand, camera in the other, and a third, it sometimes seems, manipulating the camera setting. “I didn’t realize before how beautiful insects are,” he says. “And when they try to fly away, I keep telling them, ‘I’ll make you famous.’” The results of Dong’s work are evident throughout the Academy and its publications. Many of the exhibits display his photographs, and these pages have presented his images of the endemic creatures of the countries he’s visited. This very column has often been illustrated by Dong’s portraits of his Academy colleagues. Dong’s journeys haven’t come without a price. He has contracted all four known types of malaria, succumbed to a case of giardia and temporarily lost 28 pounds, suffered a sprained ankle, and been fed on by leeches and insects. But that hasn’t stopped him any more than the various government authorities he has had to confront along the way. As I talk to him, he is packing for his next overseas expedition. Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild. |
