2002 Wendy Cheng
Wendy Cheng, a first-year graduate student in the Geography Department here at Berkeley, is the winner of the 2002 Dorothea Lange Fellowship.
The $4,000 prize is awarded each year – to a Berkeley faculty member, graduate student or senior accepted for graduate studies – for outstanding work in documentary photography and a creative plan for future work.
Cheng was honored for her photographs of the urban landscape in Taipei, Taiwan and Tokyo, Japan – two locales that have strikingly different approaches to space.
"In Tokyo, everything is planned and there is an aesthetic sense to every open space," said Cheng. "By contrast, the landscape in Taipei is more haphazard and random, and not really set up to accommodate the movement of its citizens."
Cheng said her work is influenced by the "New Topographics" movement launched in the 1970s.
These photographers, she said, "challenged people to consider all of their surroundings – pretty gardens as well as the parking lot next door – as part of the landscape."
Using her fellowship money, Cheng will travel around the country this summer in her car to document new tract-housing developments in the West and compare them to more established suburbs in the East.
"The tract home is rapidly becoming the dominant American residential form, with deep cultural, social and economic implications," she said. "These communities seem to rise up overnight on the overgrown fields we played on as children."
The fellowship, sponsored by the Office of Public Affairs, was created in honor of Dorothea Lange, one of the 20th century’s most accomplished documentary photographers.
Lange's moving depictions of migrant farm workers – shot while working for the Farm Security Administration – came to symbolize the tragedy of the Great Depression and spurred the government to provide assistance for those it touched. Lange's husband, Berkeley economics professor Paul Taylor, established the fellowship in 1981 to support the use of color or black-and-white photography in an academic project.
Photo Gallery
Taipei, Taiwan 1998
A wall of trees on Nanking East Road.
Taipei, Taiwan 1999
In the old Hsimenting district, a parade celebrating local Taoist deities passes in the distance.
Taipei, Taiwan 1998
An alley behind a temple on Minsheng East Road.
Taichung, Taiwan 1999 A hazy sunset in this rapidly developing central city
Hsin Peitou, Taipei County, Taiwan, 1998
A scene in Hsin Peitou, a generally wealthy suburb of Taipei.
Taipei, Taiwan, 1998 Looking down on the Taipei Railway Station.
Taipei, Taiwan, 1999I encounter a three-legged dog.
Project Proposal
Little boxes on the hillside: The tract housing of the American landscape
The tract home is rapidly becoming the dominant American residential form, with deep cultural, social, and economic implications. The tract-home community rises up seemingly overnight on the overgrown field we played on as children. Its row of identical houses stares at us unflinchingly from the ridges of hills by the interstate. The triangular flags announcing its opening direct us to the developer's office and model homes A, B, C, and D. The community takes its name from the English countryside, or Italian villa life, or the Spanish-Mexican ranch. If you earn an uppermost-middle class income, you'll probably be looking at the largest homes, with architectural references to Mediterranean leisure, 3-car garages, sweeping cul-de-sacs, and plenty of palm trees. If you earn merely a comfortable living, you may choose from the plainer 2-car garage homes, lower on the hill or further inland, with pleasant though nondescript shrubbery. Whatever your income (as long as you are roughly middle class), there is a community that has been built with your means and preferences in mind.
I propose to spend the summer of 2002 photographing in a wide range or such tract-home communities, in particular those built in the past decade, and drawing inspiration from New Topographics photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. I will begin in San Diego County, where I grew up and, I believe, an exemplary location for this project, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. Then I will move outward to Phoenix, Denver, and other metropolitan regions that have experienced explosive growth in recent years. I will travel by car to better understand the connections of these communities to their regions and to see if my instincts—that these communities are prototypes diffusing over the entire nation—are correct. The project will culminate in an exhibition of 16x20 or larger color photographs, an accompanying booklet, and a Web site.