Nature as you’ve never seen it
Print Edition
THE Shanghai Center of Photography attempts to challenge the objectivity of the photographic arts by presenting alternatives that reconstruct and reinterpret the world around us with innovative pictorial approaches. The center’s latest exhibition, “Nature: A Subjective Place,” features more than 70 works depicting the natural world using novel techniques and styles.
From some of the epoch-making works by late American photographer Harry Callahan, to large-scale compositions by Chinese photographers Luo Yongjin and Shi Guowei, to a dozen crafty collage works by local artist Ni Youyu, the exhibition demonstrates how “photographs have the power to astonish visually, emotionally and intellectually, and foster greater awareness of the role we play in shaping the natural world,” said curator Karen Smith.
The show begins with Callahan, Smith told Shanghai Daily during a talk at the opening. The self-taught photographer made a fundamental impact on American photography, introducing a new degree of abstraction into the realism that had previously prevailed.
“To me, he made this leap into the abstract by understanding the essence of nature. We find a lot of photographers in China today are doing similar experiments,” Smith noted.
Shanghai-based contemporary artist Ni Youyu creates places nowhere to be found in the real world by assembling and reconstructing old photos.
Beginning in 2010, Ni’s landscape assemblage series was inspired by his interest in antique silver process photos. He categorized his collections of around 10,000 photos, according to composition and subject.
He assembled each piece by hand, with an average of around 10 partial photos taken at various times and places.
“Authenticity and objectivity are traditionally regarded as the essence of photography,” Ni observed.
“I’d like to show something that’s completely subjective.”
Lin Ran, on the contrary, is considered as a “typical ‘National Geographic’ photographer” — that is, one who seeks out an ideal spot and waits for the right moment.
“For him, it’s about being there,” Smith said. “It’s the photographer that’s seeing it.”
A composition project by Beijing photographer Luo Yongjin offers a novel portrait of Xi’an City, with hundreds of landscape photos, snapshots of ancient scroll paintings and architectural blueprints. Myriad pictorial elements are coherently woven into a large-scale artwork covering two walls to show “a comprehensive interpretation of the city which cannot be condensed into a single shot,” Luo explained.
“What is wonderful about (it), in the beginning, you don’t necessarily notice that they are so beautifully layered together,” Smith said.
Also through composition, photographer Shi Guowei makes an attempt to challenge objectivity and blur the boundaries between photography and painting. Shi compiled multiple frames of a cluster of objects into one piece to break the common laws of perspective in which objects recede into the distance, and then color-glazed the black-and-white photo.
“Some people relate this to the cavalier perspective in traditional Chinese landscape painting, but what I actually want is something flat,” Shi said.
“It’s completely something about me — I subjectively framed it, composed it in my ways, and colored it as I felt like it,” he said.
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