Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao is a photographer who has made the borough of Queens his inspiration and his young life’s work. His first major project is the Habitat 7 series, which was his MFA Thesis project at School of Visual Arts. It won the New York Times Magazine "Capture the Times" photography contest in 2005 and was subsequently exhibited at the Queens Museum, published in book form by Nazraeli Press, and featured in American Photography 22. His more recent Grand Concourse project was featured in DART in July 2009.

Liao approaches his work like an archeologist of the social landscape, immersing himself in the history and the life of his subject. His process results in images that make powerful impressions that amplify the already enormous scale at which he works. When I learned that MTA Arts for Transit had installed one of his images (below) in the 42^nd Street Bryant Park Station, the Manhattan terminus of the 7 Line, I invited Jeff to do a Q&A for DART.

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Last Game at Shea Stadium, 2009; 66 x 315 inches; copyright and courtesy the artist.

Peggy Roalf: I read in your bio that from the time your family moved to Queens from Taiwan in 1999 you’ve always lived near the 7 Line. How did knowing the landscape alongside that elevated train influence the way you came to view the city? And what prompted you to take on this large-scale project for your MFA thesis at SVA?

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: While I’ve been living along these tracks for years, I am still constantly awed by the complexity of the communities formed alongside it as well as the harmony in which so many people of distinct backgrounds are able to live. I set out to photograph the “habitat” of the 7 Line as I came to see it, with a focus on not the individual but the people as a whole, as well as their relationship with their environment.

Four of the earliest major civilizations were formed in river valleys. The fertile lands provided surpluses of food that allowed for the growth of populations, development of cities, and thus civilizations were created. Though we now live in an industrial and technological era, where the survival of our existence no longer simply depends on the availability of food, the pattern of our quest for living space still resembles that of the ancient river valley civilizations.

Such is the premise of the 7 Line, the seven-mile-long subway line that connects New York City’s Times Square with seven communities in northwest Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the country. On a smaller but equally complex scale, some of the distinctive characteristics of a civilization – an intricate and highly organized society with the development of elaborate forms of economic exchange, as well as the establishment of sophisticated, formal social institutions such as organized religion, education, and the arts – are evident in the communities that have developed alongside the tracks of the 7 Line, much the way that societies developed alongside great rivers in antiquity.

PR: What kind of research did you do before deciding which sites to shoot?

JL: Very much like a sociology study. I got to know how people live in this area and what kind of food they eat, the air they breath.

“The International Express,” as the 7 Line is dubbed by the Department of City Planning, is simultaneously a trip around the world and a voyage to quintessential Queens. I feel like a vicarious globe trekker on the 7 Line. Every stop brings me to a vibrant community that reflects each of the approximately 150 nations whose people have immigrated here. Communal memories permeate the streets. Store and restaurant names, as well as their architecture and patrons, recall a variety of native lands.

The racial and cultural diversity maintains its essence at the same time seeming to be transformed by its placement in the American way of life. The links between the 7 Line and immigrant settlement patterns are historically paralleled. Its tracks, built mostly by immigrant laborers in the early 1900s, were intended, in part, to redistribute the large number of immigrants living in Manhattan more evenly throughout the City. The 7 Line, which began running to Queensboro Plaza in 1915, gradually expanded over the next decade to its present terminal in Flushing. Immigrants who moved out of crowded tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a better quality of life in Queens settled along the route of the train. Today, a high percentage of immigrants to Queens still choose to settle in the northwest section of the borough.

PR: Did you meet any people while traveling on the 7 Line who influenced your ideas about the project?

JL: Yes, everyone I met among the communities around the 7 Line influenced me. For the theme of the project, I was helped by Mitch Epsetin (SVA thesis critic teacher) and Tom Finkelpearl (thesis adviser). After the project idea was formed, I simply went out to find (create) images that fit my need.

PR: How did you prepare for your shooting sessions, and how long did they usually take? Or did you visit the sites more than once?

JL: Working with an 8x10 camera, every session of shooting is well planned. Since I know the neighborhood well, I carefully make notes on seasonal light, and human activities. On average, I revisited the sites at least 3 or 4 times at different time of day and in different seasons.

PR: Can you describe the process you use to create views that are stitched together over time – and have the effect of presenting people interacting with their surroundings?

JL: For me, stitching images together is very much like how people go about forming a society. To accomplish this, I collect evidence of human existance (my photograps as documents), then put them together to make a society evident. Every element I made for each image was created from the same day of shooting. Creating an image which can represent the same atmosphere of the scene that I witnessed is the goal.

PR: Some of the images in Habitat 7 have a wonderfully eerie quality of light - as in Long Island Railroad at Hunters Point – the kind of light you’d find in a SciFi movie about the end of the world as might unfold in Queens. Does that come from using images you made at different times of day?

JL: Actually, all the images with an “eerie quality of light” were shot in a matter of whole afternoon or a few hours. After all, with 20 to 30 8-by-10-inch chromes, I can pick and choose which images I want to use, then remix the light, the time, and the themes together in my computer.

NOTE: Another image from Habitat 7 is on view at Julie Saul Gallery through the end of August; 535 West 22nd Street, # 6F, NY, NY.