How to watch a photo exhibition

Editor: Shu Nanwen: Hai Jie poet, curator, video critic and columnist. He has worked for many domestic media and published more than one million words in magazines and newspapers such as Reading, New Weekly, Southern Weekend and China Photography. "When you walk into a photography exhibition hall, your relationship with that exhibition has already begun. I mean, in that common space, you and the exhibition have the right and possibility to evaluate each other. " Visiting film festivals is often the best choice for photographers after shooting, especially in photography festivals with a wide variety of works. How can I watch a film festival, what aspects should I watch and how can I get the information I need from the exhibition? This is perhaps one of the most puzzling problems for many movie friends. To some extent, the exhibition is the way the curator speaks, which is likely to make many viewers dissatisfied, because they think that the exhibition is the presentation of the photographer's work. Yes, photographers tell the audience the value of their works through exhibitions. But more importantly, through the arrangement and arrangement of such an exhibition, as well as the setting of the main direction of the exhibition, it shows the way of speaking and views as a curator. Usually, when you enter the exhibition hall, you don't plunge into it, but feel the space and atmosphere first. If it is a complex exhibition hall, then you can only feel the part near the preface. Next, we need to look at the preface, which is a very important link. The curator tried to set a field through the preface to let the audience enter the context he set. For the audience, it is not a bad thing to enter this context, because first we have to understand what he wants to say. Start with the preface of the film festival, understand the preface, and then look at the works. At this time, it is necessary to be meticulous and macro. Meticulousness refers to the observation and pondering of a work, including the observation and observation of the picture of the work (which is the core of the work), the identification and consideration of the production process and media of the work, and the observation and doubt of the mounting and the output size of the whole work. Macro-examination points to the overall layout of the exhibition. A good exhibition is full of breath and rhythm, and only by mobilizing the audience's emotions can we achieve the effect of viewing the exhibition. The audience can control the overall layout (the works vary in size, why is this small one enlarged? Why do some even look irregular? Why should the works be arranged in this order? ), which needs to be combined with the reading experience mentioned above, because the photographer may only shoot a single work when he creates, and the curator finds an internal connection in a batch of works created by the photographer, and edits and presents them. If you want to know more, you might as well look at the label of the work. Some works will, and some won't. On the one hand, there are labels indicating the pictures of the works, the stories to be told, and some works to be sold, with information such as size, edition and production technology. If you see little red dot on it, it means that a work has been sold. In the whole exhibition process, the big space is often ignored, and sometimes a good exhibition often needs the help of the big space to make a statement. To see an exhibition, we should not only see the good places, but also see the problems, such as whether the visual center of the exhibition works is suitable for most people, whether the people in the space interfere with the photos too much, and whether the wall color is suitable for this exhibition. At the beginning of watching Kodeka's exhibition at Pingyao Photography Festival, we often ignored the posters posted at the entrance of the exhibition hall, but those posters were Kodeka's remake of Czechs' declaration of war against the Soviet invasion, and the reason why the exhibition wall was painted black was related to the history that Kodeka wanted to present. If you watch more exhibitions, you will understand why Masao Yamamoto put his works so small and why Wang Qingsong put his works so big. Even in some exhibitions, the audience may be part of the exhibition. When Jean Christian Bokar, a French photographer, exhibited Camden County, the work discussed the habitual viewing advantages of the rich in Camden County, the most dangerous city in the United States. As an audience, we are in a superior environment (the exhibition hall is spacious, we can enjoy air conditioning in summer, and everyone has leisure and can dictate photos). Isn't that what photographers want to discuss? 20 12 Pingyao Photography Festival won the Camden County of Jean Christian Boca, the exhibition site of Deka.