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"For a while, I couldn’t afford to develop my film, so I tossed the rolls I’d shot into a fish tank.
They once soaked in cat urine and whisky, and stayed that way for many years.
Fourteen years later, I developed them.
Those images turned out to be tougher than I was." — Huang Jun Tuan

The Taiwanese photographer’s fourth photobook Ah, Youth, published in 2025, is a retrospective collection drawn from undeveloped rolls he shot during his university years—now printed for the first time. For him, it was a time stripped bare by poverty yet charged with youthful recklessness: running wild, drinking hard, shooting voraciously. That raw, unguarded way of living became a memoir in pictures to a youth once lived.

“Fourteen years ago, a pack of GENTLE 7 soft-pack cigarettes cost fifty dollars, a roll of Fujifilm X-TRA 400 was sixty-five, and developing and scanning at Taibei Ying Xiang (台北影像) cost a hundred. Back then, I lived in a cramped ground-floor studio off Linsen N. Rd near Minquan W. Rd. In summer, cockroaches—and sometimes centipedes—would appear at my door. Mornings, I’d pass boys smoking K or hostesses passed out drunk. At night, I’d wander the streets with my camera, and when tired, I’d slip into the McDonald’s across from Wego, order a Coke, and sit by the window, watching suit-clad club hosts hustle for clients on the street.

I had little money, but I shot every day, convinced that anything was worth recording, dreaming that one day I’d stand on my own as a photographer. I clutched my camera constantly—even in sleep—shooting with an almost pathological urgency, devouring every emotion around me. It was the period when I photographed the most, and the most madly.

When I couldn’t afford new rolls, I’d pull out the film leader from a roll I’d already shot and expose it again. The used rolls went into a glass fish tank about 30 by 15 centimeters—once home to a golden pufferfish my college girlfriend and I had kept. I still remember its name: 小金. After Xiao Jin died, the exposed rolls piled up in that tank, left undeveloped for lack of money. The cats I’d just adopted, 咬夜 and 切切, for some reason liked to urinate in it. So the film sat there, steeped in urine—perhaps also in peaty whisky—for fourteen quiet years.

They stayed there, rusting, reeking, much like my own life. Until 2024, when I finally sent them out to be developed. Some images survived, miraculously—blurred, faded, and smelling faintly of youth gone sour. I gathered them into this book and called it "Ah, Youth"—Youth, with a comma, but no period.”