Photography: How far is it from the reality of China?

Social reality and spiritual reality constitute the present reality of China. The camera as a recording tool and photography as a recording method, which are highly anticipated, are being challenged by various experiences from photographers, subjects and viewers. Truth comes from different fields, but it should come from the heart. Discovering and further understanding our world is what photography tries to achieve.

The Dafen Oil Painting Village in Yu Haibo shows that migrant workers are producing oil paintings on the assembly line in dark space and high temperature. The naked skin color of workers and the brilliance of classical famous paintings are an illusion of time and space.

The photo of Yuri Eberwein's work Kashgar reflects that the photographer is a cautious intruder, and the "emotion and survival" in the photo report can't be seen in the work, but the curiosity of the intruder.

Ning Kai's work "Amnesia", suburban roads, birds on the balcony ... photography is a tool to fight amnesia.

"How far is the story from the truth?" It is the theme of China in the 20 12 Lianzhou International Photography Exhibition. This seemingly simple theme raises a question of the distance between the recorded reality and the truth, which has aroused debates among many scholars and photographers present and absent. There are many ways to reach the distance between the reality and the truth in the exhibition. This way is transformed by the photographer's subjective choice, the limited recording of the picture, and the limitation of the exhibition mode, theme and even irresistible factors. In fact, photography presented to viewers has deviated from the function of "recording" at the beginning of its birth.

"Authenticity" needs to be maintained by both the audience and the photographer.

News photography requires absolutely objective reporting information, but this possibility has been distorted to the point where it is impossible to distort it again, and we can only see the irreversible reality. Therefore, the viewer of the so-called "authenticity" must be permanently vigilant, and the reader should also be objective and calm about the presented picture, so that the true restoration can reach a certain degree.

But authenticity only involves limited scope and space, and it is impossible to ask everyone to produce * * *. "Relatively speaking, it can be understood by more people without language conversion and subjective choice of various ways." Lu Lin footballer, a photography theorist, thinks that "it just tells people the so-called truth, but the photographer actually has a choice when he presses the shutter".

As early as the late1980s, the artist Mo Yi shot a series of works in an unconscious way, in which the street people who broke into the camera showed indifferent expressions, and then someone criticized Mo Yi for "deliberately choosing an indifferent space". So, he tied the camera to his bicycle, pressed the shutter at will when riding, and then showed the image to others, in order to objectively prove that the indifferent image he took was not a subjective choice, thus proving the so-called objectivity. However, every route selection in Mo Yi is inevitably a subjective selection process, although such randomness will be more objective than selective shooting.

The Spiritual Reality of Private Photography

Compared with a photographer like Zhao, who died just a few years ago and faithfully recorded all kinds of life as a Jianghu traveler, the photographer who caused the biggest uproar in the world was Zhao, who spent eight years showing the living conditions of the disadvantaged groups at the bottom, such as rickshaw pullers and scavengers. How to evaluate those "private photography" that focused on the decadent inner spiritual world experienced by China people during their growth? How should we evaluate the works of contemporary artists who make a face and put on several movie scenes, and then turn them into "conceptual" photography? Of course, it is another route for contemporary artists to get involved in photography and cut into social phenomena from another angle. However, if contemporary artists do not intervene in current social issues, such as race, identity, and gender, numb intervention cannot produce power. The way of photography adopted by contemporary artists is to enter a conceptual system after changing their understanding of reality, which is no longer the problem of photographic truth we simply know, but the externalization of the photographer's inner truth.

Perhaps in the industrial age, "private photography" has become a deconstruction of a certain truth, more internalized and private, but the space for authenticity is relatively narrow, and it can only exist in a small circle to produce * * * sounds, and it cannot undertake the so-called effective supervision in a larger circle. The sense of responsibility is even more nonsense, and it is even more conscious for the camera below.

Yuan Dongping and Lv Nan's mental hospital, Shen Jianzhong's humanism, Sun Jingtao's petitioners, Jie Hailong's big eyes, etc. From the sixties to the eighties. Later, there were Yang Yankang, Shaanxi Rural Catholicism, Yang Yankang, Leprosy Hospital, Runaway Children, Mike, Surrounding the City in the Countryside, Prison, Small Coal Mines and Sleeping on the Street by Cattle. Yu Quanxing's Poor Mother, Old Town Chamber of Commerce, Wang Jun's Children in Immigrant Villages, Ning's City of One Person and some other works. These documentary photography liberated photography from the political propaganda function of Acura and became the photographer's moral gesture.

The reality of this world is far darker, more complicated and more diverse than what we have seen and experienced. The reality in China is so rich and wonderful, and the dramatic scenes provide the most thrilling picture. We have no right to ignore it. If a photographer pretends to turn a blind eye to it, his spiritual reality may be worthless and not worth seeing at all.

"But you can't ask too much of a photographer. You have to take pictures and help others. Photographers put the secret world in the sun through photos, let everyone see it, let us know how those people live, and let the relevant departments do something. This is the responsibility of a photographer. " Curator Na Risong once commented on this in an interview with an art critic.

All this is really related to the changes of the times. Discovering and further understanding our world is what photography tries to achieve.