JEAN LOH 23 OCTOBRE 2017 ANDY SUMMERS un crâne au bord de la route

Marc Riboud - Monsieur Le Prince de la Photographie

Marc Riboud is a gentleman as gracious as the name of the street where he lives. When I pay Marc a visit, alone or in the company of Chinese photographer friends, I always enjoy the uphill walk in this Latin Quarter, siege of the famous barricades of May 1968 (*1) along the “Rue Monsieur Le Prince”, thinking with delight at the coincidence of the two names and relishing the pleasure of our upcoming conversation. And because of Marc’s righteousness for certain causes and of his unbending and noble love of freedom and independence, I say to myself each time: here I am, about to visit Monsieur Le Prince of Photography.

From as early as his first successful great picture, The Painter of the Eiffel Tower, Marc seemed to have defined his photography as “the pleasure to see”, to wander aimlessly and to capture the world by instinct. He would say that he is no philosopher or sociologist and that he simply looks at the surface of things. Yet this apparent pretense to a certain lightness of being did not stop him from producing a series of powerful pictures that challenge the viewer to observe and to think; such as his reportages on Africa, North Vietnam, on the Iranian revolution, the Algerian independence, and the anti-war campaign in the USA. Yes, Marc Riboud’s art cannot be more explicit as here in this little flower held out in both hands by a young girl to the gun-toting soldiers; a moment of magic and poetry, of peace and love, in the midst of a most dramatic and potentially violent confrontation: that was Marc’s “instinctive moment” (*2).

Over nearly 60 years of making pictures, it is his China photography that really makes up his seminal body of work. Following in the footsteps of Robert Capa (1938) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1949), from the end of 1956 until 2006, Marc Riboud has visited China some 21 times, achieving a frequency of quasi annual pilgrimages during the 1980’s and the 1990’s. This is the country he has photographed more than any other world photographers without speaking the language, or becoming a sinologist. Marc has always insisted on remaining an outsider in order to keep a fresh eye and be “ready for surprises”. His favorite subject, the Yellow Mountain, stands out as the metaphor of Marc’s fascination with China. “I thought it would have been easy to photograph landscape.” “Not so.” He would say. “The landscape on Huangshan keeps changing so fast. With the haze, the clouds and the lights constantly on the move, you have to stay alert, chasing after the shades. In the end it is really tiring but so satisfying, and so gratifying.” This description fits perfectly with the different and changing faces of the vast land of China he has crisscrossed and captured. From the Northeast steppe to the Southern rice fields, from the Anshan’s industrial zone to Shenzhen’s boom town, from the East coast to the Himalaya chains. Marc has always been chasing after the lights and the shades of China and its people, producing an impressive and unprecedented composite portrait of a country on a 50-year rise.

Obviously Marc does not only look at China through his lenses. He has over the years made many friends, photographers or not. As much as he was fortunate to have had such mentors as Cartier-Bresson and Capa, he has tried in his way to perpetuate this tradition of “passeur”, for example in his remarkable relationship with the Yunnan photographer Wu Jialin. With one not speaking a word of Chinese, and the other not a word of anything but Chinese, they have developed a close exchange over 17 years. While Marc has been guiding and nurturing Wu Jialin into maturity, through Wu’s pictures Marc has been able to keep himself constantly updated with images of the heartland of China and of its mountain folks in his mind and in his heart.

This China retrospective is a unique opportunity to measure out the steps and the journey of a giant in photography, a chance for everyone to grasp the importance of a vision of the world and of China (50% of the prints of this retrospective are about China) by a master who equates his picture taking to the daily practice of a musician.
It is also a training course for our eyes, a lesson in “seeing”. The fact that Marc wanted one of his favorite pictures to feature as the cover of this exhibition’s catalogue, specifically the one with the lightning struck eyes of an enigmatic Bratislava man from a huge outdoor advertisement, is an illustration of the combination of structural, quasi geometric sensibility and an instinctive perception of unusual grace - even beauty (*3) which characterizes the classicism and the modernity of this Prince of photography, and a heartfelt invite from Marc for us to learn to see.

Merci, Monsieur Marc Riboud!


Jean Loh
Curator
(*1) May 1968 which Marc has covered, published in a book “Sous les Pavés” ed La Dispute, 2008 with some 60 pictures
(*2) Anti-war march in Washington 1967. Marc Riboud was the only photographer left at the scene to capture this iconic moment after a long day of confrontation. He ran out of black & white films and took up a second camera which was loaded with color negatives for a last shot. This unpublished color shot was rediscovered recently and displayed at the occasion of his 50-year retrospective at the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris 2009
(*3) Described as “punctum” by Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire, 1980

Barbara Plays Ouka Leele

The first time I came face to face with Ouka Levee’s work was this enigmatic lemon-headed woman that was part of the VU’ agency anniversary project called 80+80 which I curated in Pingyao in 2007. I could not explain the work especially when it is catalogued as “photography” because I somehow felt that it looked more like a painting to me, or even like a parody of advertising. The name of the author reminded me of the Hawaiian 4-stringed instrument called Ukulele but did not tell me whether the author was a HE or a SHE. The second time I saw another Ouka Leele work was at a lecture given by Christian Caujolle who recounted the anecdote of how he – at the time photo editor of the Daily Liberation – found a funny picture to illustrate a reporting about a book festival. The picture was of a bearded man with an open book sitting on his head. Again the coloring struck me as unreal. When Caujolle dialed this photographer in Spain he was surprised to find out that was actually a SHE and that she spoke a little French. She told him she first took a photograph in B&W then she enhanced the image using water color. In a way, Ouka Leele defined her art as putting a partition between the photographic paper and the reality and this layer, this partition is painting.
I became curious about the creativity of this Spanish artist who began her career in the late 1970’s after the death of Franco. And I realized she was a key member of the Movida, a cultural and artistic revival of a post-Franco era.
Historically speaking, Spanish dictator General Franco died in Madrid in November 1975, ending 36 years of repression and censorship. King Juan Carlos I facilitated the democratic transition by appointing a new government. By 1977 Spain held the first democratic election in 40 years and a new constitution was signed. Enrique Galvan became the mayor of Madrid: he was the key promoter of the Movida Madrilène. By 1982 for the first time a socialist party came to power and Felipe Gonzalez became prime minister. People in Madrid were excited by the new freedom and turned everything into exuberant celebration and happy revolution. Everyone was free to express whatever he wanted, to have fun, to dress up, to move, to create, that became the “Movement” or “Movida”. It was post-dictatorship, post-censorship, new democracy, new freedom; liberation in all fields including political and sexual, leading to unbridled creativity in art, design, comic strips (Ceesepe), music (Alsaka, Mecano) and cinema (Pedro Almodovar).

Born in 1957, Barbara Allende Ouka Leele described herself this way: “I was born into a family where it was natural to have paint brush, photo camera and cinema camera around. My parents pushed me into this early on. I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up: to paint, and I dreamed of inventing colors. But I didn’t know that I would end up painting photographs. I became hooked by photography the day I saw the magic revelation of an image on a piece of paper. Then I started playing with inventing images, and capturing them with a camera became my language. I was speaking about my own reality through colors and paint brushes. The rest is a boring résumé of love stories, of learning from masters, from dreams and miraculous experiences such as waking up every morning and opening my eye on a new world.”
In that context Ouka Leele’s first work was an homage to the Surrealists who in 1938 have organized the International Exhibition of Surrealism, where 15 artists such as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, etc were given each a dressmaker’s mannequin which they could transform in any way they desired, with Man Ray as the photographer of the end result. One picture by Man Ray at that time also showed Andre Breton as “God” with a crown of thorns on his head. Following that lineage Ouka Leele’s series “Peluquerías” announced clearly the revolutionary nature of a new photographic portraiture: an impressive production of provocative portraits she made of her friends: singers, artists, designers, actors etc, hairdressing them with all sorts of odd and absurd things on their head. These photos shot in B&W were then water-colored into saturated high-contrasted tone to create a distorted representation. The daily home objects, Coca Cola bottles and irons and toasters might constitute a reference to American pop art, but the fish the turtle, and the octopus would relate to Christian symbolism and mythology. More deeply they are exploring one of the most basic instincts of human being: that of transformation through disguise, transvestite, masquerade (see today’s Cosplay). Playing with hair, the emanation of sexuality that we wear openly on our head, this distinctive and remarkable series of portraits proclaims the power of imagination, now totally free of censorship or of any taboo. In her first home movie shot in silent 8mm black & white film in the 1970’s we can see the making of “lemon”: she (Ouka Leele) was laid down on the floor and placed herself the lemons around her head to compose the picture. Her friends wearing an iron or a fish on their head went parading in the street or driving in the tunnels of Madrid. One guy was wearing a huge octopus on his head, he picked up a pair of scisors and cut off its tentacles which dropped to the floor like in a hair salon. A newlywed couple went up a high rise tower with the bride wearing an ensemble of cola bottles and the groom wearing a set of electric shavers….There was such an air of absolute freedom and creativity that we could imagine the fun the Dada and the surrealists were having when they created their art works in the 1920’s, and 1930’s.
In the 1980’s Ouka Leele moved more assertively into traditional painting, especially pictorial classicism, her “tableau-photography” acquiring abundant draperies and more baroque elements, with a stronger flavor of Spanish surrealism (Bunuel, Dali) and a more dramatic stage setting.
The work called “Innocence and Youth” (1984) clearly refers to Goya’s Maja, one of the greatest works of Goya’s made in 1800, a nude is lying on a red velvet couch with a red cushion in the most classic pose. It could perhaps also be a reference to Manet’s Olympia, the black telephone symbolizing the black servant or the black cat in Manet’s painting. The plastic wrap in lieu of draperies could suggest the semi transparent dress for the clothed Maja. It is her way to show the convergence of tradition and modernity.
A more complex staging is the apparently enigmatic “Peor Impossible” (1985) showing a group of people posing on the beach. This painted photography with yellow as the dominant color was originally created as a cover for a Rock band’s album, the name of the band was Peor Impossible, meaning “impossible to be worse than that”, in terms of posing, Ouka Leele may be laughing at her own staging of all these artificial and exaggerated poses. Actually this photo pays homage to the greatest classic painting of all times, Las Meninas (1656) by Velasquez, about the teenage princess with her courtesans, as we know Picasso alone has painted 58 reproductions of Las Meninas. Here the naked man on the foreground plays the role of the dog in the painting. Ouka Leele’s modernity lies in the fact that this is “Cosplay” before the concept even exists. This parody of Velasquez would allow for multiple analyses (why the princess is here offered a green crocodile in lieu of the cup of clay to stop her precocious menstruation as in the original painting?). Velasquez’s remarkable treatment of interior space is here replaced by an open space on the beach. Photography becomes a demonstration by Ouka Leele of an artificial reality even less natural than painting.
To understand the major master piece of Ouka Leele: “Remember, Barbara” this monumental photograph of 150x120cm, three key factors come into consideration. The first is the reference to mythology and in particular to Metamorphosis of the Roman poet Ovid (43-17 BC) – a classic legend about the princess Atalanta who was raised by a bear and who agreed to marry the first man to beat her in a foot race. Eventually, Venus helped out a young man named Hippomenes. She gave him three golden apples to drop during the race and delay her. So he won the race and Atalanta as a wife. But he forgot to thank Aphrodite, who made them consummate their marriage in the sacred temple of the goddess Cybele, who punished them by turning them into lions. This story was made into a classic painting by Guido Reni (born 1575) whose focus was on the two characters Atalanta and Hippomenes forming with their semi naked bodies a striking dissymmetric ballet with the boy sustained in his run towards the right side and the girl stooping to pick up the apple towards the left side. In 1987 Ouka Leele proposed to the mayor of Madrid to hold a sort of “art performance” in the biggest square of the capital, right at the fountain of Cybele with the two stone-lions, by stopping all traffic she created the most dramatic stage set with sixteen models and a whole team to reconstitute the story of Atalanta. And here is the second consideration, this photo painted in pink and orange is actually a declaration of love by Ouka Leele to the city of Madrid. Cybele being the goddess of earth, the artist wanted to affirm her attachment to the city where she was born, to her own roots. She was so intimately connected to the Movida that this picture reflects all that moves and agitation and the contemporary ambiance of the city within the esthetics of classic painting. The last point refers to the title “Remember Barbara” which addresses her real name, Barbara Allende, but which comes from a poem of the French poet Jacques Prevert “Rappelle-toi Barbara” (1946). The artist explains that the title is to remind her never to forget the Cybele inside of herself. In 2005 that is nearly 20 years later, Ouka Leele organized another performance at the same place, this time for an artistic intervention in denouncing violence and abuse, and to help set up a shelter for battered women and children. 300 people had joined her to recreate her picture of 1987, which was filmed by four cameras placed in different places of the Square. Three colors loaded with symbolism, the black of death, the red of life and the white of purity, were used in the costumes for men, women and children who formed a circle around Cybele, goddess of the earth and fertility.

From the 1990’s onwards Ouka Leele’s photographic creation became more intimate, although still elaborate in the staging, especially with nudes. And she seemed to have given up coloring her pictures, and elected to use even digital photography. This nude with mirror is again a typical example of her classicism and her modernism.

Jean Loh

My Cousin From America - a photo-biopic by Tatjana Loh

The title, deliberately ambiguous, is actually my own “cri du cœur” about the people and history personal to me. One fine day in 2008 a beautiful brunette, Tatjana Loh, glowing with a California suntan, walked into our gallery. Immediately we hit it off by talking about photography. She eventually confessed that she was a photographer and we exchanged business cards. I saw that she had the same last name as mine: LOH (*1). So I asked: “Do you have anyone in your family tree from Shanghai?” She replied: “Yes, my father is from Shanghai. He migrated to the US in the 1940s.” “So!” I exclaimed: “You are my cousin from America! You have to show me your pictures some day!” Two years later I received a FedEx box from the US: Tatjana Loh, my cousin from America, did something nobody is doing anymore: she sent me twenty 40 x 50 gelatin silver prints, beautiful black and white photographs documenting her family. I was moved by the images and, based simply on what she sent me; I decided to show her work here to the Shanghai audience.
Her photo-essay, especially the portraiture of her father, resonates deeply with me--both my personal history and my relationship with my father, himself a son of Shanghai, born in the district of Baoshan in the town of Dachang, but who passed away in Torrance, California. Yet, most of all, Tatjana’s series of family portraits are an excellent occasion to meditate again on the practice of family photography, which has been characterized by the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu in 1965 (*2), rightly or wrongly, as an “art moyen” (a “minor art” as practiced by the Middle Class).
I too was born into a displaced family. My father, who left Shanghai in 1939, had married my mother who came from a Fujian refugee family in French Indochina: both of my parents had been uprooted by the Japanese invasion. Very early on my mother decided that each year we would have our family portrait taken at a professional studio in French-Colonial Saigon. As the number of children grew, first my older sister, then me, then my two younger brothers and one younger sister, these family portraits, which were supposed to update my grandfather in Shanghai, served also as a formal registry of a firmly grounded family with improving material conditions (both my father and my mother started out with practically nothing). Alas, this registry that was supposed to describe a family firmly grounded, soon ended as the children grew up then left to pursue higher education far away in the US (the girls) and in France (the boys). When Saigon eventually fell to the Communists, my parents were displaced again, moving to Taiwan, then Thailand, until my father finally retired to California. In addition to these official annual portraits, my parents had a Rolleiflex and took their own pictures of the children in daily family life, birthday parties, school “kermesse” gatherings, piano lessons, New Year celebrations, visits to other families. Just as for families around the world, photos are a way of keeping memories grounded, keeping a family’s idea of itself in place. Families use photos to remind themselves that, “We were together, we were happy, we were young.”
Many years later I came to Shanghai and met my uncle (the younger brother of my father). I learned that all the family photographs that my grandfather had kept, dating back to when the ancestral home was still standing, before the Japanese bombings, including the pictures my parents sent from Saigon, (because of these photos, our Shanghai relatives had been labeled as “having spies abroad”)-- all had been destroyed and burned during the Great Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards had gone from house to house searching and punishing families for harboring such a shameful capitalistic hobby: cherishing family photographs. That autodafé of photographs, a burning at the stake of these memories, at least in the Chinese revolutionary practice, lends some justification unfortunately to part of Bourdieu’s field of investigation classifying family pictures as a bourgeois middle class’ “art moyen”. That partly explains why I fell in love with Tatjana’s family photography.
If we examine Tatjana’s photographs with a kind of Jungian lens, one is struck by the interrelationship or the dialogue between the tender observation of the children at rest and play, shot mostly in landscape format, and the ironic and sometimes comical commentary of the father figure, usually presented in portrait format. More than anything else, Eugene Loh is the central figure of this so-called “family circus” (a label used, with an eye wink, by Tatjana herself to describe this body of work when it was previously exhibited in a gallery). The bigger-than-life old man stands tall in spite of - or perhaps thanks to - the daughter’s attempt to show him in all his human frailty: cold and shivering on the beach, searching in the dumpster for leftover coffee, helpless in the hands of nurses and doctors at the hospital, even looking like an extraterrestrial in a sort of oxygen tank in a preburial ritual. We see the frail gymnast hanging upside down on the bars in his torn swim trunks that he found in another dumpster. Is he really that pathetic or does he exude the same zest for life that we see in the photographs of his youth? In the old photo album of the 1950s indeed, Eugene Loh smiled with all his bright white teeth, Shanghai’s son at the peak of his glorious conquest of America: from earning three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. at the best universities, to escorting California girls in his glamorous Buick! A man who used the German that he learned in Shanghai to conquer the heart of another immigrant, Gisela Jacobsen, though later she would divorce him, and he went on to marry and divorce and marry again three times. All the photos are open to different interpretations.
Concerning pictures of one’s parents, Roland Barthes describes the evocative magic of photography, as he muses on a photo of his mother in his book, Camera Lucida (*3). He reflects on a photograph’s powerful effect on the spectator and how it can create a false illusion of “what is” (c’est), when, in fact, it merely represents “what was” (ça a été). It is a tragic realization that one cannot hold on to the lasting presence of our loved ones. This reminded me of Raymond Carver’s poem in which he ponders a “Photograph of My Father in his Twenty Second Year” (*4)
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
Perhaps it is too commonplace to say that Tatjana’s photographic biopic is actually a love poem to her father. I would offer that these photos show that the camera can become a sort of umbilical cord that reconnects us with our progenitors, and that it helps calm our own existential fears when we grow old enough to realize our mortality; we are compelled to photograph our aging parents as a way of holding onto them. This is for the weakest of us all, we, who still cannot accept our breaking away from the divided cell. Our father or our mother, the animus and the anima, are the two faces of this coin branded in the middle of our belly, this universal "scar" we share with all human beings. Photography of one’s old father has become almost a genre; Annie Leibovitz (*5) touchingly photographed her dying father (also the last days of her companion Susan Sontag). Richard Avedon (*6), who questioned truth in photography, also photographed his dying father, though with more cool. Referring to the fact that “all cameras lie”, Avedon has said that in real life “family members scream, argue, and cry”, and yet he had never seen a photo album with people in such moods. But in Tatjana’s album there is no posing, children are crying and laughing, and father Eugene is certain to attract attention from people with his eccentricity. If these images are a love poem, we can see indeed a lot of physical contact in this human menagerie, hand touching hand, caressing, caring, ear cleaning, nails cutting, eating together, sleeping together, it is a highly tactile family, rich in gesture and body language. Using a linguistic twist we are very far from the “Immediate Family” of Sally Mann (*7), a great woman photographer from Virginia, USA, with her elaborate esthetics and haunting portraits of her naked children. Tatjana’s sensitive portrait of her nephews and nieces appears to be a revenge on the lack of love from her own father yet her anger towards her father hardly disguises a certain fascination with the charismatic and seductive persona of Eugene Loh. American photographer Philip Toledano (*8), in his deeply moving portraiture “Days with My Father”, wanted to explain to the viewer: “Now you have to realize my dad was very handsome when he was young. When people talk about ‘film star handsome’ well, that was my dad.” But there is no need for any subjective glorification about Tatjana’s father: we can see for ourselves that Eugene Loh was really ‘film star handsome’ when he was young. At the same time the power of photography lies in its cruel but truthful documentation of the aging process and its damages. And it is the courage and love of Tatjana in seizing the ordinary and the not so ordinary moments of this Amer-Asian family as it is--and as it has become, with a natural and intimate lens. At the same time Tatjana has provided us with a marvelous and entertaining occasion to appreciate the best practice of the American school of photography of the 1970’s (*9) in terms of lighting and composition – or the apparent absence of composition, through irreverent “snapshots” as inspired by Garry Winogrand (*10) and Ken Graves (*11) who were among the first to “steal” from the style of amateur snapshots to compose a serious body of photographic work.
Our existential anguish in the end finds some relief and solace in the innocence and tenderness of childhood, delicately and magnificently displayed through the “almost candid” camera work of Tatjana’s and in this profusion of Southern Californian light; we are bathing in a refreshing and cathartic exposure.
Jean Loh
Curator – Shanghai June 2010
(*1) The Wade-Giles system of Chinese romanization before Hanyu Pinyin was widely in use, but for places and names the French Postal Map system based on Ecole Française de l’Orient was adopted incorporating local dialect. So the character “continent” in Mandarin pronounced LU in hanyu pinyin in Shanghainese becomes LOH. Hence in old French maps of Shanghai “Lujiazui” was spelled “Lohkazi” and “Xujiahui” = “Zikawei”.

(*2) Pierre Bourdieu: Un Art Moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Les Editions de Minuit 1965
(*3) Roland Barthes: La Chambre Claire – Le Seuil 1980
(*4) Raymond Carver: The Collected Poems - 1983
(*5) Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 – Random House 2009
(*6) Richard Avedon: American Masters - Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light (DVD 1996)
(*7) Philip Toledano: www.dayswithmyfather.com
(*8) Sally Mann: Immediate Family – Aperture 2005
(*9) Anne Biroleau : 70’ La Photographie Américaine, Bibliothèque Nationale de France - 2008
(*10) Garry Winogrand: Figments from the Real World – MOMA 1988
(*11) Ken Graves: American Snapshots, Scrimshaw Press 1977

REQUIEM FOR MOUNTAINS & WATERS (on pollution in China)

LU GUANG’s REQUIEM FOR MOUNTAINS & WATERS
On the 14th of October 2009, at the Asia Society in New York City, Lu Guang walked on the stage and received the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, becoming the 32nd recipient of one of world’s most prestigious photography awards and sharing the recognition with past great recipients like: Jane Evelyn Atwood, Eugene Richards, Sebastiao Salgado, John Vink, Jim Nachtwey and Paolo Pellegrin, etc..
For Lu Guang is a “war photographer”, but the difference with Jim Nachtwey or other war photographers, is that Lu Guang has been covering a war raged by man against nature, against our own living environment.
As Robert Capa wondered whether one is close enough, Lu Guang takes us into the battle field, right in the middle of the action. He leads us to the front line. In packs of shots, stray bullets of heavy metals whistle past our ears. Shells of acid rain explode over our heads; our eyes are stung to tears by these toxic gases. Lu Guang embarked us on a fishing boat in the deep of night, rowing in silence to the middle of the river and signaled us to wait. Suddenly a geyser of filth bursts out from the bowels of the river; the black water instantly turns into indescribable colors. The stench of filth spewed by these underground pipelines suffocates us, patches of white things rise to the surface: fish are dying by the hundreds with their bellies up.
These cannot be objective photographs, or some cold evidence. Lu Guang has really gone to these battlefields, has visited these refugee camps, felt the pain of these displaced victims, he wants us to finger these gaping wounds on the body of those sick with cancer, to touch those legs of deformed children. He wants us to breathe the unbreathable air. He wants us to share what he sees. And what we see are terrible images, unbearable images; that challenge us, provoke us to the point of anger and revolt.
For the past five years, patiently trekking over mountains and waters, across 12 provinces, Lu Guang brought back these pictures, sometimes at the risk of losing his freedom or even his life. His nervous photography, with saturated images taken in motion, dense colors and apocalyptic skies, reveals an intense and somber touch of humanity. It is our sacred duty to show his pictures as they are, and as a homage to W. Eugene Smith. Lu Guang is truly a hero of humanistic photography.
Jean Loh
Curator

Exhibition from 21 November 2009 to 20 January 2010
Beaugeste Photo Gallery
Shanghai 210 Taikang road, building 5, space 519