(bright chimes play) - [Lara] Photographer William Waldron tells us how he gained international fame for his work on beauty and solitude.

Union College professor Sheri Lullo reveals the secrets of ancient Chinese tombs and catch a performance from Albany Pro Musica.

It's all ahead on this episode of "AHA!

A House for Arts".

- [Narrator] Funding for "AHA!"

has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M & T Bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M & T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(playful music) (slow piano chimes) - Hi, I'm Laura Ayad and this is "AHA!

A House for Arts", a place for all things creative.

Let's send it right over to Matt Rogowicz for today's field segment.

- I'm here in New Lebanon, New York to get a look behind the lens of photographer, William Waldron, follow me.

- I walk through the world and I see things sort of deliberately.

I look at things very carefully and I'm apt to take one step to the left or one step to the right and take another look at something if I think it looks a little better from there.

I've been a photographer, literally my entire life.

I think I was given a camera by my father when I was maybe five or six years old and I've hardly ever put it down.

I'd say there was a lot of hard work and yet I got really lucky.

I was in my first year in college studying liberal arts and I called my parents from the payphone in the hallway of the dormitory and told them that I wanted to go to photography school.

There was some reluctance and some concern, but no real pushback.

When I graduated from school, I was of course wondering what to do with myself.

And I kind of knew in my heart that I should move to New York and that anything else I might do would have been a little bit of a cop out.

So I moved to New York with $300 and my dad's old suitcase.

I found someone who had a spare room in an apartment in Brooklyn, which I rented from him, sight unseen.

And I started looking for work as a photographer's assistant, which is sort of an apprenticeship.

An additional reason for coming to New York was that Art Kane was in New York and he was a photographer, an American photographer whom I lionized.

He was a contemporary, mostly fashion photographer and I had come across his work for many years in photography publications.

I would call his studio as I would call every photographer whose phone number I could get my hands on's studio and ask if I could come in for an interview as a photo assistant.

I was told no that I couldn't and they were fine, and I could mail a resume in, which I did about eight times.

And I finally obnoxiously took to knocking on the studio door and telling them that I happened to be in the neighborhood and I wondered if I could just drop off my resume.

And I think at a certain point, they asked me to stop doing that as well.

But I did meet someone there and one day the phone rang and they were down a photo assistant and asked if I would come in and I did.

Being a photo assistant in New York is how I learned to be a photographer, as distinct from how to take pictures.

They're two very different things.

If you're going to work as a photographer in any commercial way, for magazines, for advertising, you need to know how to get a job, how to edit film, how to deliver a job, how to get paid, basically how to conduct yourself.

And they don't teach that at school.

After about three years as a photo assistant and running a studio for a photographer, I decided that it was time to go out on my own.

And I was determined to draw a line in the sand.

I had seen some friends sort of straddle both worlds and keep working as an assistant and hope to get a few jobs of their own.

And I instinctively knew that wouldn't work for me.

I had to just declare myself a photographer and go out and try to find work.

So I decided to take a trip really to take pictures and to build up my portfolio.

A friend who spoke Spanish offered to accompany me on a trip to Mexico, where I had never been.

So we took off for five or six weeks on sort of a photo safari through the state of Chihuahua in Northern Mexico.

There is a community of about 50,000 Mennonites in the state of Chihuahua.

And we happened across this large, large tract of land where they were farming and it was just stunningly beautiful.

The people were interesting and pretty exotic.

They were exotic in both time and place.

So I returned to New York City, now that I had declared myself a photographer and put this portfolio together.

And I literally called every magazine on the newsstand.

And I went to see them with the same portfolio.

I would go to Vogue Magazine and Sports Illustrated on the same day and show them the same pictures.

And it never occurred to my young mind that photographers actually specialized because in my mind it was all photography and I loved all of it.

I remember saying to one of my friends, I thought I was in the entertainment business because people would always thanked me profusely and tell me how much they enjoyed looking at the pictures.

And I'd never hear from them again.

One day I went to House and Garden Magazine in the Conde Nast building, and I had made an appointment with someone to see the art director and the art director was a woman named Karen Lee Grant.

And I had the same response from Karen that I had had many times, but the next day, her photo editor called me and gave me my first job.

So I was thrilled.

I think I went in and had a meeting with her.

I was then sent to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to photograph the stone cutters.

After doing a bunch of these stories for House and Garden, the art director, Karen Grant called me into her office again and said that she was going to send me to photograph a house as that's primarily what House and Garden magazine did.

And I told her, "Oh, no, you're not.

I don't know how to do that."

And she said, well, I'm sending you with Babs and I know you'll be fine.

So off we went and photographed a house in the Hudson Valley of New York.

And I came back, I had the film processed and sent it to the magazine and they liked it.

And they sent me to do another one and then another, and then another.

So House and Garden Magazine was published by a company called Conde Nast.

And all of their magazines were in a building called the Conde Nast building.

And they were all quite competitive with one another.

So as soon as my name started showing up in House and Garden, the phone really started to ring.

I was getting calls from Vogue, from Vanity Fair, from GQ, from Gourmet.

Working for all of those different magazines was really making my dream come true because I felt vindicated in my idea that photography is photography and I didn't need to be specialized.

I'm mostly known as a natural light photographer.

I love natural light.

And I'm the last one in the evening to ever even think about turning the lights on.

In fact, I sort of obsessively turn switches off everywhere I go.

Well, I'm definitely a romantic and I love to use the camera to bring an idealized version of things.

I think you could generalize and call my pictures contemplative.

They're very deliberate and quiet.

All my life, my relationship with art, I think has been transportive ever since I was a small kid and it really continues to now.

I see things in a certain way and I endeavored to bring you there.

To bring the viewer along with me, I have so much gratitude for the career I have, and that I've actually been able to pull this off.

Even during the most lean years when I didn't have enough work, I had good work and I feel forever grateful.

- Sheri Lullo is an Associate Professor of Asian Art History at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Her work as an archeologist focuses on ancient tombs and burials in China.

But what did Sheri learn about the private lives of people who died thousands of years ago?

I spoke with her to find out.

Sheri, welcome to "A House for Arts."

It's such a pleasure having you.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- So I understand Sheri that as a professor and as a scholar, you write articles about Chinese art in particular, you do research on ancient burials and tombs.

Am I right about that?

- Yes.

What have you found inside these tombs?

How old are they?

- Well, the ancient Chinese filled their tombs with so many different things.

The period that I study is called the Han Dynasty and it lasted from 206 BCE to 220 CE or AD.

So about 400 years.

- That's over 400 years.

- 400 years.

- Wow.

- And it was around this time that the Chinese started to believe in the concept of an afterlife.

So they filled their tombs with all kinds of different things.

They had a lot of unanswered questions, of course.

So they sort of answered them materially in their tombs.

They would have items of protection, items of travel, certainly comfort items and items of status.

- So you mean to say Sheri, that these are questions they didn't know about?

Like what happens in the afterlife or where do you go or do you live the way that you do like, in your life, life?

I don't know what other term to use to describe it.

- Yeah, they set up their tombs.

Some of them look like houses, they had architectural features.

Some of them had a lot of paraphernalia for travel.

So there seemed to be a lot of different conceptions of what the afterlife held, but most people believe that they did believe that the soul continued to live and that it needed most of what it had in life in order to enjoy the kind of life it had already had.

- What are some of the favorite things you've ever found before that people would have used in life and then they need them in their tomb?

- Well, there's a lot of spectacular items that the Han Dynasty is famous for like large suits of jade, made from thousands of little finely carved jade pieces.

That was for royalty.

And also, - I can imagine.

- also beautiful silks, so paintings, but the thing that I've always been interested in since my dissertation work, the more mundane things that people place in tombs that give us a sense of the more day to day lives of the early Chinese.

- 'Cause I understand that you focus on toiletries, right?

Like the things that people use to beautify themselves or in their toilet or their bathroom.

So I'm curious to know what do these toiletries reveal about people's private lives from thousands of years ago?

'Cause I think when you're talking about the jade suits and the silks, you think about patronage and royalty, and you think about like the kind of public persona, but when we're thinking about toiletries, it almost sounds like you're seeing another facet of people's lives.

Were these private lives, anything like ours today?

- I think they were similar.

If you look at what's in the boxes.

So they're rounded boxes filled with mirrors and combs, but the more well-preserved ones might include eyebrow pens and tweezers, cosmetic powders, powder puffs, even hair extensions.

- Wow.

So eyebrows were a big thing then, even before the whole Instagram craze with eyebrows.

- Oh, indeed.

They completely clipped out their entire eyebrow and then re-colored it in.

So they had many different styles, different trends throughout the period.

- It sounds like by looking at these types of items like these combs and, you know, eyebrow pencils and things, you can learn something about conceptions of beauty at the time and ideals of beauty.

Are there other types of things that these toiletries reveal to us that people may not know about the quote unquote orient?

So for instance, does it reveal something about like the culture and politics of the Han Dynasty or of that period?

- Yeah, one thing I've found was that males in ancient China used cosmetics.

And it's really interesting because there've been some recent discoveries that actually pushed that phenomenon back a couple of hundred years before my period, where they found tombs with little bronze vessels that have residue of cosmetic powders at the bottom and interdisciplinary studies are allowing them to learn these kinds of things.

- And by interdisciplinary studies, do you mean like studies that incorporate like methods from art history, methods from archeology or anthropology?

Is that what you mean by that, Sheri?

- Yeah.

I mean that the archeologists are unearthing these things, and then the scientists are taking over to actually analyze the contents of those residues.

- Like to date them organic it's organic material, right?

- Yep.

- That's incredible.

So it's as if we are also learning too, that men's understanding of how to look and how to be beautiful were very different then, thousands of years ago in China than maybe they are today in the United States.

- Perhaps.

- I'd Imagine even today, even in China, - Perhaps.

- Yeah, I think like today, I think there's a range of people out there.

And I think certainly elite men used cosmetics.

There was an ideal of clean, clear white skin socially for men and women.

And it was also a political ideal to have clear skin as a man.

And men also had to lavish attention on their hair, particularly their facial hair.

Beards were a symbol of masculinity and virility.

These were also political ideals.

So I think it's interesting that the boxes can tell us stories, much more complex stories than we would ever have expected.

- Right, I'm curious to know Sheri, how did you first get interested in studying Chinese art and these burials and tombs?

Did you go and travel to China before you went to graduate school?

- I did.

I feel very lucky that I've kind of always known what I wanted to do.

I've always wanted to do what I do today.

Back in high school, I already knew I was going to study art history.

I also already loved all things Asian.

And I think this is partly because we didn't really learn about these things.

We certainly didn't have art history in high school and history classes were dominated by the Euro-American tradition.

And I also grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and would sneak to Chinatown every time I could.

So that also helped.

Then when I got to college, I started studying the language and I did have the privilege to travel to China as an undergrad, both China and Taiwan for language study, and also for a little bit of thesis research.

- Right, so you landed there speaking Mandarin.

- I did, yeah.

- That's amazing.

Do you have any like particular stories from your time, like going and studying there, that were like, just really stick out to you or really crazy memories?

- I mean, just all of the experiences of being like a teenager in China.

I mean, I was 18 or 19, but still I was a teenager and some of my research trips would take me to smaller cities.

And on the streets of those cities, this is 20 years ago, on the streets of those cities.

People would stop at that time and stare and say foreigner.

And I would be pretty shocked, (Lara laughs) - That's awkward.

very uncomfortable, a little scared, but I quickly realized that if I just continued to be my American friendly self and said hello in Chinese, that they immediately turned warm and they had a smile and they were so delighted to speak with me.

And I made lots of random friends.

- Amazing.

That sounds like such a valuable experience for you.

And you can bring a lot of insight too.

Cause I was curious to know, I want to come back to that actually, some of your cultural experiences and the insight you can bring, but I was really fascinated because I looked online for Chinese antiquities and I found these websites that sell ancient Chinese vessels, like a Neolithic vessel from 2,500 BCE for like $700.

And I'm wondering, what do you think of these websites, Sheri?

I mean, who is buying and selling these neolithic vessels?

Are these pieces being looted?

What's going on with that?

- I think that a lot of what you see on those sites, particularly the unofficial ones are really good fakes, but there are some authentic items being sold and they would be very likely looted from Chinese tombs.

And that is a real tragedy.

You'll notice that the sellers of those sites are anonymous.

The buyers are often, they have the option of being anonymous and all of this contributes to the continuation of an illicit market in antiquities and the continued plunder of Chinese archeological stuff.

- Right, and I imagine the internet with all of its anonymity helps to drive this even more.

And I also understand too, I was doing some research, It sounds like the Chinese government's also signing bilateral agreements with some countries to help repatriate or bring back some of these looted antiquities.

I know like the US and Australia, house some of the most amount or the largest number of buyers of these Chinese antiquities.

So it sounds like this is a really pressing issue on a political level.

- Yeah, I think those bilateral agreements are really important because they acknowledge the respect for antiquities from both countries, right?

The US acknowledges that these are part of the patronage of China and China recognizes that it must protect its cultural heritage.

- Absolutely, I kind of want to bring us forward then in time speaking about politics and also tie back into that insight that you're bringing when you had these cultural experiences, when you were younger.

And I'd imagine you'd been going back before the pandemic to China, you know, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and then it started spreading to the US there was a lot of talk in the news about how the virus apparently originated in China.

And even though we don't know the exact geographic origins of this virus in actuality, a lot of Chinese living in the United States or Chinese Americans were dealing with racial discrimination and people were blaming them for the spread of the virus, even other Asian-Americans who would just be lumped together, confused with the Chinese, would have to deal with this sort of scapegoating.

And I'm kind of curious to know, what do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that many Americans may have about China and the Chinese or about Chinese politics or culture or history.

- And that's a very big question and a very good question.

I think it's an important question to think about, and I can give two examples.

One being my own experience.

My impressions from travel to China have been a lasting memory of the very honorable way that I'm always treated as a foreigner and as a guest in their country.

The Chinese are extremely hospitable and generous, extremely generous.

It's part of their culture.

It's ingrained in their culture to have the highest regard for a guest.

And I don't know if Americans today extend those same courtesies to foreigners on our soil, especially those who are from vastly different cultures who look different, who eat different foods.

- Even speaking with an accent sometimes will get you a little bit of negative attention here in the states.

You know, sometimes people think you're not as smart because you speak with an accent, right?

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- And the other thing would be regarding those misconceptions, I think that extends, sort of what you said within your question.

It extends beyond the Chinese themselves to Asians, that there are Asians living here in the US who are from a multitude of Asian countries and cultures.

There are Americans here who are of Asian heritage and they all get lumped together as one group.

So I think it's really important that we have a curiosity about those cultures, that we learn about them, that we explore their individual experiences, that we understand where they came from.

And then maybe we can start to not make the mistakes that some people make today.

- Yeah.

Absolutely a lot of great food for thought.

Sheri, thank you so much for being on the show.

It's great to have you.

- Thank you so much.

- Please welcome Albany Pro Musica.

(sombre violin plays) (angelic singing begins) (upbeat music) Thanks for joining us, for more arts visit wmht.org/aha, and be sure to connect with WMHT on social.

I'm Laura Ayad, Thanks for watching.

- I haven't seen this footage, taking the chair away.

(laid-back music) - Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation and the Robeson Family Foundation.

- At M & T bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M & T bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.