Fortunate one

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 2, 2008

During his trip to China earlier this year, Steve Coates was visited over and over by good fortune.

Just a few days before he was to travel to Tibet, the border was locked down because of internal unrest there.

“If I had actually been in Tibet when that happened,” he said, “it would have been bad. They would have expelled me, but first they would have confiscated all my film.”

On another occasion, the Lynchburg-based photographer tried to get a ticket on a night train into the Chinese interior. The train was sold out, forcing Coates to wait until morning. But a few hours later, it crashed, killing 40 people and injuring hundreds.

Finally, he spent a few days in Sinchuan Province in May. After he left, a massive earthquake in that region killed more than 10,000 people.

Lucky, lucky, lucky Steve. Then he came back to Lynchburg, that island of comparative tranquility, and was hit by a car on Rivermont Avenue June 25.

“I was on my bike,” he said, “and I flew up in the air and landed on the hood of the car. I broke four bones in my neck, and the doctors said it was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed.”

Not only is Coates recovering — he’s up and about — but even that incident provided an epiphany.

“I wasn’t able to work in my dark room for awhile because of my injuries, so I reproduced all my prints digitally,” he said. “I was surprised at how good they looked, and China may have been the last trip I take using film.”

Which is saying something for Coates, whose show, “re-Made in China,” opened Friday at the Up Front Gallery at the Academy of Fine Arts. He has always been a purist, preferring black and white to color, always in search of the haunting, evocative shot that no one else has ever pulled into focus. His style was like hunting with a bow and arrow, whereas digital seemed more like using an AK-47.

Still, times change.

“In China, I had a special backpack that I used just for film,” he said. “It got to be kind of tiresome.”

For those of us who find even choosing an unknown dish on the menu of our local Chinese restaurant too risky, Coates’ total immersion in Chinese culture was nothing less than crazy – er, courageous.

There are now 1.3 billion Chinese, and Coates knew none of them. Nor did he know a word of Mandarin, and while a mono-lingual American can sometimes figure out French, German and Italian based on their common Romance language roots, the symbols he encountered in China were, well, Chinese.

“I got along just fine,” he said. “A lot of people speak English there, especially with the Olympics coming up, and sometimes I’d go into a restaurant and just point at what looked good.”

He traveled solo, stayed mostly in youth hostels, and his itinerary, he said, “depended on the weather.” His mode of locomotion was mostly trains and buses, he added, “because it is illegal for a foreigner to drive in China.

“And that was OK with me, because the drivers there are insane. The unwritten rule is, whoever gets there first has the right of way.”

The Chinese seemed fine with having Coates take their picture — in fact, they wanted to take his picture.

“Because I was an American, I was kind of a celebrity,” he said. “Everyone wanted to pose with me.”

Coates left exhilarated by the energy he found in China on the verge of the Beijing Olympics.

“I hate to say it, but I contrasted that with the U.S., where we’re in kind of a negative cycle,” he said.

Only once, Coates said, did he find himself feeling threatened.

“I had hired a guide to show me Turpan, which is kind of a Wild West outpost in the desert, and since there turned out not to be that much to see, I told him I was shortening the trip from two days to one.

He threatened to leave me in the desert, and I said, ‘That’s fine. I’ll just catch another ride back.’”

The guide backed down. That’s the way Steve Coates’ luck was going — until he got home.