From looking at photographs together after a session to the camera operators identified in a film essay, this text considers how He Fa and P4's moving-image practice makes the photographer's position visible—and why visibility is still insufficient evidence of equality.
P4 Theater website essay · 2026-09-08
Behind a photograph, who first gains the right to interpret?
A photograph can readily compress a complex encounter into a result. The photographed person leaves an expression, the photographer a composition, and an observer judges from these what happened between them. But the questions, pauses and tension before the photograph, and why a particular action did not continue, do not automatically enter the image. A frame may seem to contain a person while omitting most of the process that made the photograph possible.
In What Is Real Image?, He Fa arranges photographing and subsequent expression separately. There is more than one encounter, and photographs are viewed again in later meetings.1 What matters in this arrangement is that interpretation can continue after the photograph is complete. The person speaking before the image need not simply accept a caption already written by the photographer. This leaves time for the photographed person to enter the work again.
It does not, however, mean that interpretive authority has been equally distributed. Choosing which photographs enter discussion, which question opens it and who decides the order of display still affects what can be said. Discussion of P4's photography therefore needs to ask more than whether the photographer is willing to listen. It must ask through what procedures listening occurs, and whether the other person's response changes the final presentation.
From camera placement to position: the body outside the frame
The 2026 Kinok-Relation Dossier places the photographers in Shoot Self with You at the centre of its discussion. It organises its argument through six actions—making visible, changing hands, holding, raising, lowering and archiving—and emphasises that camera operators can be addressed by name in the event, while also being affected by its material and by bodily distances.2 These are reading propositions made by that essay. The present text has not independently checked its timecodes and identifications of people shot by shot.
These propositions offer a useful shift. Conventional analysis of camera placement attends to height, distance and angle. Analysis of position goes on to ask who maintains that angle. Whom must the operator approach, move around or wait for? An identical close view may result from prolonged negotiation or from an abrupt approach. Judged only by the size of the image, the two may look similar; once the filming process is included, the relationships they establish are very different.
The photographer's body thus becomes a condition for understanding the image. Handheld movement is not automatically honest, nor does a stable camera position necessarily mean control. What needs to be observed is whether bodily movement answers changes in the situation: how the camera handles distance when someone steps back; whether filming acknowledges someone speaking to the lens; and how the image preserves or removes a pause when the event stops.
Once a position becomes visible, has power changed?
Bringing the photographer into the image disrupts the illusion that the camera simply exists there naturally. But being visible and being alterable are different things. A maker may display their working process with considerable candour while still deciding alone how material is selected, interpreted and circulated. Self-exposure can even become a new authorial image: audiences remember the maker's risk-taking while still not seeing how participants affect the work.
The Kinok-Relation Dossier's emphasis on multiple people handling cameras therefore needs to be read alongside the later expression stages in Real Image.21 Changing hands alters who can film what; looking back alters how what has already been filmed is interpreted. They address different stages of production. Passing on a camera does not guarantee that editing is also reopened to discussion. Allowing people to speak after filming does not guarantee that their views enter the public version.
This is not a demand that every work adopt one system of collective editing. It is a way to separate the word “collective” into concrete facts that can be assessed. A clear account of a work should let readers distinguish the stages at which participants contribute actions, those at which they hold decision-making power, and those at which the author still bears responsibility for the final judgment. Greater specificity makes the actual shape of collaboration more visible.
End credits and the labour that is preserved
The Kinok-Relation Dossier also brings naming in end credits into the question of photography: people appear bodily during an event, then are organised through names and responsibilities at its end.2 This observation reminds us that a work consists of more than visible images. Credits, posters and project introductions also determine how the public will later remember a collaboration.
Credits are necessary and limited at the same time. Without them, particular labour can be flattened into the phrase “collective creation”. With credits alone, sustained companionship, briefly taking over a camera, providing a space and sustaining an event may be compressed into excessively tidy job titles. Reading a credit list can lead back to participants' accounts of what a person actually did, rather than treating the list as a complete map of relationships.
Yun Jianhui's Once Again records discussions about film with He Fa, the crew's viewing of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's work and preparations for the public performance.3 It brings photographic labour into view beyond the press of the record button. Looking, discussing and developing expectations together also affect what a camera operator later knows to wait for. This text cannot replace a complete production archive, but it offers a concrete route beyond a list of names.
Watching again with this question
The next time one enters the Real Image material or public discussion of Shoot Self with You, three changes can be noted separately: who is looking, who can answer that looking, and what happens after the answer. The first two identify positions; the third connects position with actual consequences.
If someone addresses the camera and nothing subsequently changes, the resulting image can still be powerful. It may preserve precisely a situation that could not be changed. Criticism should articulate this discrepancy rather than declare equality achieved merely because the image acknowledges the photographer.
From the renewed encounters of Real Image to the Kinok-Relation Dossier's discussion of multiple camera operators and credits, P4 offers a sustained way of questioning photography: return the final image to the process of its formation. The value of this approach is not that it certifies a photographer's honesty, but that each act of looking can continue to ask what makes it possible.
Three stages of a viewing position
| Stage | What it can change | What still needs to be asked |
|---|---|---|
| Changing hands during filming | Who has the opportunity to frame and record | Who decides which material is kept |
| Looking back after filming | How participants interpret their representation | Whether their interpretations affect the public version |
| Credits after completion | How labour becomes publicly identifiable | Which processes of collaboration the list omits |
Sources and original texts
- What Is Real Image? — He Fa, 2020-06-21
2. KINOK-RELATION DOSSIER | Why Must the Person Holding the Camera Also Surrender? — Credited in the original as 伊凡·位托夫, 2026-05-12
3. Shoot Self with You D | Once Again — Yun Jianhui (identified in the body text) / published by P4, 2023-08-24
An essay for the P4 Theater website, based on public archives. Its analysis is not presented as the direct speech of He Fa or other participants; historical source texts retain their own credits and dates.
Chinese webpage: https://p4theater.cn/knowledge/camera-return-gaze/