(Southern People Weekly Reporter Dashi/Photo) The floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor of the ice room are just like a viewfinder. On an autumn afternoon in Guangzhou, the panoramic view of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the ice room accommodated the electrical appliance

(Southern People Weekly reporter Dashi/Photo)

The floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor of the ice room is just a viewfinder.

On an autumn afternoon in Guangzhou, the panoramic view of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the ice room accommodated the electrical appliances mall outside the building and the nucleic acid testing team downstairs. Between the two rows of banyan trees along the road, after avoiding several express electric vehicles, Yan Changjiang walked away with a large book in his arms. Cross the street to exit the painting, go upstairs and take a seat before entering the painting.

Between the frozen lemon tea and frozen coffee on the table, he handed over his photo album of the past 30 years. His eyes drifted back to the cover several times, and his voice said sincerely, "If you don't like photography, I will take it back."

Yan Changjiang is 54 years old this year. He is calm and solemn when he doesn't speak. He is a photographer, curator, photography critic, and the picture director of the editorial center of Yangcheng Evening News. What he was handed here was a collection of his life struggles - "Paper Man" taken in the countryside when he first arrived in Guangdong, "Night Zoo" taken at the beginning of the new century, and three sets of works he created in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in seven years before and after the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Opening the book, he pointed to the Three Gorges people and the Three Gorges that seemed to have been soaked by fog in the photo, "These places are already more than a hundred meters deep underwater."

In the past ten years, he has stopped photographing, but he writes reviews and curates other people's photography works. In his recently published collection of photography criticism, "Jinghong Photos: Excerpts from Contemporary Chinese Photography," he completely avoids his own works. In this personal observation of Chinese photography, he lists the domestic photography works of the past 40 years: Lao Jing's "Square", which draws the bow to capture the behemoths of the times; Hou Dengke 's "Maike", the picture and the land are suffering together; Zeng Guang Zhi's "East Meets West" is grand, straightforward and brutal... Since the 1980s, "the outstanding photographers of this period have been fighting against the difficult and complex times. They are the summaries, discoverers and warnings of the times." He said.

And he himself no longer shoots. To take a step back, after writing so much and shooting so much, can you really stop shooting if you say you won’t shoot?

"I won't take pictures anymore." He said with certainty, and even added again as if to clarify the relationship, "I haven't taken pictures for a long time. The books are all from the past." Putting individual crises into the flow of narratives of the times is a very smart approach, but the causal relationship may be more complicated.

At 3 o'clock in the morning on the day of the interview, he went home after proofreading the newspaper layout at the newspaper office. The afternoon interview was scheduled at a ice room near his home because he had to pick up his children from school that evening and it was not advisable to go far. For 30 years, he has been working in newspapers, recording city news and the pulse of the times on more than a dozen pages a day, and then turning the present over and making it a thing of the past.

Having been exposed to the turbulence of the news industry for 30 years, his personal agitation seems to have been smoothed by experience. After reaching middle age, he has ironed out the wrinkles in his heart over and over again at home and work. But when he opened this photo album produced for him by photographer Liu Zheng, he seemed to have returned to the upper reaches of his life, regained his uneasiness, and found comfort and repair from it. Among the scenes entangled with his life, the most important ones are still the three creations of the Three Gorges: First, he worked with journalists and photographers to rescue the "remains" of the Three Gorges before the reservoir was built, but when faced with the great changes of the times, documentary was no longer enough for him; he went to the Yangtze River to bury many black boxes, and his concern remained unchanged -

. For the last time, he returned to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, hung ropes from bridges and trees, hung himself, and swayed.

In this era, confrontation is the basic attitude of photography.

For a popular newspaper, documentary nature is the most important attribute of photography. During the recent epidemic in Guangzhou and the World Cup, Yan Changjiang was still planning photography topics with his colleagues in the "Yangcheng Evening News". He also organized photo topics for his own unit, such as the photos of his colleague Song Jinyu who traveled to the scenes of major disasters such as the Wenchuan earthquake. ; while also sharing excellent photography from other media in Guangzhou in the circle of friends, such as the appearance of Haizhu District in Guangzhou during the lockdown captured by photographer Zhang Zhitao, and the mobile cabin hospital (named "White House") captured by Zhang after the lockdown was lifted.

“The shooting shutter speed is 1/60 second, sometimes it determines the history and how that year is presented.This is what our work is about. "Yan Changjiang said.

For Yan Changjiang, his first photography also came from documentary shooting of news. In the 1990s, after graduating from the Department of Journalism of Wuhan University, Yan Changjiang came to Guangzhou and first worked as a copy editor and reporter in the news media for 8 years. In 1996, his report "The Strange Case of Biyang·Guangzhou Awakening of Injustice" was serialized on the front page of "Yangcheng Evening News" for 10 days. He The photos taken during the interview were selected and published in the photography magazine "Focus" by Li Mei, the initiator of the Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award.

Since then, Yan Changjiang, who has been interested in images and photography since he was a child, picked up a camera and started shooting. The newspaper leaders saw that he liked photography and arranged for him to work as a photojournalist.

From 1997, Yan Changjiang went to Guangdong High School. The filming of "Paper Man" began in the rural areas of Zhouzhou City. The photography context at that time emphasized "humanistic care", and one of its manifestations in the journalism industry was to go to children's welfare homes and nursing homes to pose for photos. Yan Changjiang often looked for other shooting materials, and discovered paper figures during a business trip. Paper figures are paper handicrafts prepared in rural areas for sacrifices to . They are also a description of the soul and are backward in the context of the times. When he first started shooting, his development skills were not up to standard, and he used a variety of cameras and films, but the core of shooting seemed to be seeing and capturing.

"At that time, newspapers were at the top of the times. During the reform and opening up of Guangdong, newspapers themselves seemed to have formed a wave of the times. Everyone stood at the top, so there were many photographers in Guangzhou at that time. "Yan Changjiang said.

In the 1990s, Yan Changjiang presided over the visual news section of the "Yangcheng Evening News" and hired many outstanding photographers to take photos. At that time, the fee for a page of the visual section was two to three thousand, which was approximately equal to the housing price of one square meter in Guangzhou at that time. At that time, he made appointments for the newspaper After seeing many good works, such as "Liangshan Yi People" photographed by Li Lang, many Guangzhou photographers posted pictures on the forum he hosted. When requesting submissions, he was used to writing editorial introductions for these photographic works, and he gradually began to write photography reviews

30 years later. , Yan Changjiang pointed out in the collection of photography reviews "Jinghong Photography: Excerpts from Chinese Contemporary Photography" that China did not have real photography until the 1980s. Photography during this period was mainly about language exploration, and formed a scale in the mid-1990s, with the emergence of a group of photographers. It was not until around the 21st century that the times and young creators inspired each other, and a group of conscious and accomplished photographic artists exploded in China. He also pointed out the lack of integrity, “Most photographers will simply praise, and after the new century, they tend to over-magnify themselves and simply make fun of them. Confrontation is the basic attitude of photography. "

In the view of Jiang Wei, a photography critic and curator, when Yan Changjiang writes about photographers and photographic works, his long, crisp and intuitive descriptions are remarkable to a certain eye-catching degree. Facing the top works of the era that Yan Changjiang commented on in "Jinghong Photos", Jiang Wei believes that "it is not so much reading as it is searching and looking at certain moments of the vast reality that I don't know" -

Lao Jing's "Square" series shows that at a time of great change, Lao Jing, a Beijinger, had extremely strong sensitivity and youthful hormones. He only took pictures along the central axis from Jingshan to Tiananmen Square . He only took pictures in the 1980s, using only his own photographic language. He photographed people stunned and stunned under the square buildings, and took pictures of people standing on the Jinshui Bridge. The crowds looking around... The real 1980s was by no means a lofty, idealistic or political life, but a huge and complex complex. Lao Jing recorded the sluggishness, panic, shock, excitement and helplessness of the Chinese people in that era. Yan Changjiang believed that Lao Jing put the subtle expressions of thousands of people on the great square and gathered them into a "picture" of China.

Hou Dengke's "Maike", as a member of the Shaanxi photography group who pioneered the Chinese documentary trend, Hou Dengke's rural areas are rooted in the epic consciousness of the land, unlike some documentary photography which always have the shadow of Western masters. His photos have the Chinese atmosphere, rustic, and Chinese style. They are as sophisticated as Lao Dan Laosheng, so sophisticated that they have rich and profound meanings, but they are also clean. One of his masterpieces shows a woman walking on a plateau with a child in her arms.His sense of language is consistent with the body language of the peasant woman in the photo, and is consistent with the yellow earth. He is by no means imposing foreign or transcendent forms on the peasant woman. His works suffer together with the land itself.

Zeng Guangzhi's "East Meets West" is a grand, straightforward, concise and crude work that summarizes the 40 years of family, country and world, and enlightens the dialogue between Eastern and Western civilizations in the past two centuries. In the photo, Zeng Guangzhi looks solemn, wearing a starched Chinese tunic suit, reflective sunglasses, and a homemade ID card. He stands in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the World Trade Center. He holds the camera shutter cord tightly in his hand, overflowing with confrontation and even critical danger. He also took advantage of the China craze in the United States at that time and dressed up as a distinguished guest from China to take photos with important figures at Sino-US diplomatic occasions. "This kind of wisdom and courage is something that few Chinese performance artists can match today." Yan Changjiang believes that photos are the beauty of photography language, whether it is a tense or poetic composition, or a bright tone and charming gray scale.

The selected works in the book also present Yan Changjiang's overall view on the relationship between contemporary times and photography, "We are in a great era, how to achieve some kind of revelation and transcendence in response to the extraordinary reality."

He left several places for photography in Guangzhou in the book: An Ge and "Opening Hundreds", Ye Jianqiang and "Guangzhou Street Run", Xu Peiwu and "Pearl River New Town", etc. Since arriving in Guangzhou in the 1990s, Yan Changjiang has been able to personally experience the changes in Guangzhou city since the 1990s. "Such large-scale social changes as reform and opening up definitely require people to photograph and record. Now it's not that there are more people, but fewer people taking pictures. There are only one or two people who are good at taking pictures. How many people have photographed and recorded the process of China's urbanization? At least in Guangzhou, Xu Peiwu recorded the entire process of Pearl River New Town from a rural fishing village to what it is now," he said.

"I live in this era. Only words are not enough in an era." He said.

Guangzhou Forest, Nonsensical, Ironic and "Humanistic Care"

Yan Changjiang and Xiao Xuanan 's "Returning to the Mountain" series, circa 2010. Won the Jury Award at the 2011 Lianzhou International Photography Exhibition. The great era of

has descended on specific cities, and its performance in the past 30 years has been construction and modernization. In the early 1990s, the Guangzhou government identified a new urban central axis with Zhujiang New Town as the core in its planning.

At the moment when Zhujiang New Town was first developed, the "absurdity" reached its climax. From Yan Changjiang’s perspective, Xu Peiwu’s lens exquisitely captures the collage-like picture intertwined with various elements at that time, creating a strong surreal atmosphere: from the perspective of the crowd, farmers, citizens, and white-collar workers are “colliding” here; from the perspective of the scene, garbage and celebrities are flying together, and the farmland is the same color as the tall buildings. What's even more absurd is that this huge picture contains innocence, malice, humor, vulgarity, grace, and filth... All kinds of opposites from appearance to soul swarm out at the same time, like a vast and absurd symphony. Regarding this era and the so-called modern civilization, the most symbolic and ironic scene captured by Xu Peiwu's lens is the wild mating of two sheep on a demolition site in front of a skyscraper.

Urban changes are recorded as a whole in this set of photos, and broken down into steps, as to how this land was urbanized step by step: first, the continuation of traditional dragon boat , fishing and other rural life, and then It is about the invasion of "modern civilization" (hair salons, pollution, etc.), the entry of outsiders (migrant workers, hair salon girls, etc.), then demolition (wasteland, bulldozers, scavengers, etc.), and finally new construction and "gentrification" (white-collar workers, government activities, etc.). Yan Changjiang believes that Xu Peiwu used his camera to penetrate this process, that is, the "class replacement" in urban transformation.

Although many people take portraits of old city renovations and immigrant populations, Yan Changjiang believes that their photos always appear unclear. Xu Peiwu's photos are almost unique among Chinese photographers in recording the cruel process before and after a piece of land was changed. "He drew a model of China's suburban cities that is universal and typical. This set of works has profound social significance and documentary value."

Night Zoo (Yan Changjiang/Photo)

"He is not afraid to use well-intentioned irony towards the people and life he loves. This is more powerful than simple criticism. This is a person who loves life using his last ability to face the situation A powerful force is his personal resistance. It is powerless and powerful." Yan Changjiang also noticed that Xu Peiwu showed great respect to ordinary people living in the original ecology. He used tender and beautiful pictures to present calm group photos of migrant farmers, dragon boats still sailing under the pressure of the city, girls with messy hair in the wind, and even simple scenery: two trees and a clump of dead grass, neatly swaying like ordinary people facing the great changes of the times.

With the arrival of the new century, Yan Changjiang used Hasselblad to shoot "Night Zoo" at the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. He was obsessed with fantasy, taking a small train to the zoo at night to see animals, and lurking in the woods to take photos with the staff. Later, this group of pictures was exhibited in Beijing. The black-and-white images, coarse grain, and multiple exposure techniques blended the tranquility of the night with the nonsensicalness and magic of postmodern images into the same picture. This set of photos embodies the joy of living in an open area at that time, as well as his faint uneasiness about urban development. He not only enjoyed the fruits of modern society, but also endured the pain of material society and the troubles of urban life. These are all intertwined into a beautiful new world.

In October 2002, Wushan, Qingshi, young people waiting for the passenger ship (Yan Changjiang/Photo)

Guangzhou seems to have no shortage of good photographers. In recent years, Yan Changjiang finds photographer Zhang Weiqing particularly interesting. Zhang Weiqing started taking mobile phone cameras on the streets of Guangzhou in 2012 and posted the photos on his WeChat Moments every day as if he were displaying trophies. Compared with street photography with cameras, mobile phone photography is more direct and faster, making people feel the power and ubiquity of recording. Yan Changjiang also came up with the idea of ​​doing an exhibition for him. The Guangzhou in the picture is not an abstract city, it is rich and diverse. Zhang Weiqing's photography is a kind of interaction. "He loves Guangzhou so crazily. He only finds it fun and does not dislike its weirdness, strangeness, dirtiness and chaos. He is deeply involved in it. It is not enough to see one photographic work after another. What is more noteworthy is his repeated confrontations with Guangzhou people, as well as the interaction between reality and the Internet. He is like a sculptor who is frantically chopping and chopping, single image Like fragments with little meaning, those large combinations of meaningless images have story, style and temperament. He is trying to carve out his Guangzhou based on big data images. "

The tradition of Guangzhou street photography comes from photographers An Ge and Ye Jianqiang. They take a comical breakthrough route, and the former's images are slightly more refined. To this day, 69-year-old Ye Jianqiang still posts street photography and captions tirelessly in WeChat Moments. He is the most famous photojournalist of the Yangcheng Evening News. He is casually dressed and has thick eyebrows. He makes a living by riding a motorcycle through the streets and alleys, using an old FM2 mechanical camera to capture dramatic scenes everywhere. "For documentary photography, mass communication is its real value." It is worth mentioning that during the heyday of Yangcheng Evening News, a major Chinese citizen newspaper, Lao Ye made the best dissemination of street documentaries with a completely citizen-oriented style. It can be said that for more than ten years, Guangzhou people relied on this newspaper to make a living."

When working at the newspaper, Yan Changjiang felt not only entertainment but also emotion from Ye Jianqiang's photos. Although people have long commented on him as "satisfied" ("cute" in Cantonese), Yan Changjiang feels that these photos are not only ridiculous and cute, but also particularly pitiful. For example, in the photo "After the Arrival of Urban Management", Ye Jianqiang introduced this photo with a smile in the editorial office: The urban management drove away the fruit sellers, and the sweeper came to care. Haha, I didn't expect that she would sweep up the fruits and sell them to the ghosts.

But this is a photo that makes Yan Changjiang feel sad."The most touching photos often reflect the struggle for survival. Most of his works describe the difficulty of finding food. This is something that today's college graduates cannot notice. Now, even if new reporters have better skills than him, they can no longer photograph works like Lao Ye's and enjoy his high popularity. This is not an accident." Yan Changjiang said.

"Our documentary photography is too salon-like. Not only is the image interesting, but it is also only displayed in galleries or art museums." He believes that Ye Jianqiang and An Ge have been performing mass communication functions. "They return the images of citizens to the citizens, rather than plundering them for the elite circles to appreciate, study, and understand. Since the emphasis is on news or documentary, the meaning of the images is best returned to the subjects." He said that Lao Ye could not use the word "humanities", but what Lao Ye photographed was the bottom and background of the city.

These photographers have left behind precious memories of Guangzhou through more than half a century of street photography. "We are lucky to have such photographers in the era we live in, because many cities do not have texts that prove life, and Guangzhou is almost out of stock." He said.

Back to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the encounter with the Three Gorges

Although the time he has lived in Guangzhou has far exceeded the time he has lived on the Yangtze River, Yan Changjiang still considers himself a Yangtze River native, and occasionally mentions that the Pearl River water in Guangzhou City is too quiet, and "the Yangtze River is a rapid."

Yan Changjiang emphasized the source. The self-introduction is as detailed and lengthy as the signatures in previously published books such as "5·12 Record of the Wenchuan Earthquake ", "Guangdong Fission" and "The Last Three Gorges": the ancestral home is Guangdong Hakka , from Qufu, Shandong , was born in Zigui County, Hubei Province - a small valley on the south bank of the wide valley south of the Xiling Gorge Temple in Maoping Town. He and his brother went swimming in the rapids of the stream since he was a child. The water upstream was fast and clear, and the freedom in the water was always engraved in his life. It's just that the place where he was born has become part of the Three Gorges Dam.

In December 2003, Xiayan Temple in Yunyang County, the lamp-burning Buddhist pavilion in the river (Yan Changjiang/Photo)

There are many people who take pictures of the Yangtze River, but Yan Changjiang takes pictures of his own Yangtze River, which is handsome, dignified and elegant, like a glimpse in the long river of history. This land and the people here have a kind of elegance, as well as strong love and respect.

In May 2002, Zigui County where he was born - Qu Yuan 's hometown county - was about to be blasted as part of a reservoir in the Three Gorges Project. During the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area , 632 square kilometers of land were submerged, involving 2 cities, 11 counties, and 116 market towns in Hubei and Chongqing. Yan Changjiang felt that he had to do something, just like An Ge, Ye Jianqiang, and Xu Peiwu who persistently photographed Guangzhou. The Three Gorges was the biggest thing that happened in his personal life. "After a long period of painful thinking, some blood in my body became restless, and I decided to use Hasselblad to leave a 'posthumous image' to all the cities along the Yangtze River." He set out from Chongqing with a Hasselblad camera and started shooting along the river. His companions at the time were Wang Jingchun , and later he was joined by companions such as Zeng Han, Xiao Xuuan, and Li Zhaohui.

During that journey, he was almost excited by everything he saw, "Because on the eve of a great change, you will see all the secrets. What we see here is the bloody nature of the Han people, Han culture and surreal things. You can imagine the shock to me. I almost forgot about the idea of taking pictures of landscapes, and I was faced with excitement. People and the excited self." He used direct photography, "without any boundaries at all. Sometimes it is a portrait, sometimes it is an infinite landscape, all depicting the Three Gorges as a whole." The "The Last Three Gorges" published later is also a stormy style and emotional, which is the inevitable result of his sudden encounter with the Three Gorges.

Returning to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, there are rugged mountains on both sides of the river. "If these stone cliffs were lost, the Yangtze River would have no bones." Yan Changjiang discovered the Xiayan Temple in the grotto under a waterfall in Shuangjiang Town, Yunyang, Chongqing. Su Shi his father and son, Wang Wei, etc. all came here to compose poems. There are also many Buddhist statues from the Tang Dynasty in the temple.And he lingered in a very dilapidated ancient temple along the Yangtze River. The Wangye Temple was an ancient place for worshiping the water god and performing Sichuan opera. After the founding of New China, it became the district office. After the reform and opening up, an asphalt plant was set up here.

After returning to Guangzhou from the Yangtze River, Yan Changjiang felt that documentary was no longer enough to express the pain in his heart. He thought for half a year and decided to make a "black box". He sealed many things into the box, specially made it into a memory device, and then found a place to bury it in the Yangtze River. No one knew what he had buried. On May 20, 2003, the Three Gorges began to impound water, and the river began to rise. June 1 was the day when it was officially submerged. Yan Changjiang made the performance work "Three Gorges Black Box", and fellow photographer Xiao Xuan'an helped press the shutter button. Traveling in the villages of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River is not that easy. These photographers helped each other, exchanged information on the interesting places discovered along the river, and deepened their understanding.

By September 2006, the Three Gorges Reservoir was filled with water again, which would flood a wider area. Yan Changjiang began to worry again, and he could not think of any good method. He felt that the most direct way was to hang himself here. So he hung ropes from bridges and big trees in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and asked villagers to help pull the ropes and hang himself up, which was recorded by the camera. The series of photos "Three Gorges, Living Together with Heaven and Earth, and Lighting Together with the Sun and Moon" have a clear location and precise time. They are all meant to show the history that is happening here, and he is hanging in this moment. This group of works once hung in the atrium of Guangdong Museum of Art , hanging down for a long time.

"The three works of Three Gorges have developed, but every step is due to inner needs. It is not to save the world, but to save ourselves first." He said that regarding the work of Three Gorges, he felt that many people later took better pictures than him. Comfortable, photographers Yan Ming, Liu Ke, Wang Bo, etc., "I am obviously too entangled. There are very few people who are as deeply entangled with the Three Gorges as I am. In the Three Gorges, I am more like a guy who is charging forward. We are entangled with culture and the times, but we are entangled with the culture and the times." It was full of scars. I believe those who filmed the Three Gorges project like me also felt the same pain. It was as if I had crawled into the belly of a dragon, scratched its heart, scratched its liver, and penetrated its intestines... I can’t describe it. It really caused a lot of pain in my heart at that time. ”

By September 2006, the Three Gorges had completely settled after two impoundments. The entire Sichuan and River areas in the traditional sense had become a large lake. The situation was calm and the resettlement work was basically completed. In May 2008, the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan Province dragged him, his photography colleagues and journalists into another violently changing time and space. "Whether it was the Three Gorges or Wenchuan , the pain and awakening brought by it brought us close to the depths of the land, history and life, which will really sting you. They are extreme manifestations of our life experience, and they are quite dramatic," said Yan Changjiang.

Since then, he has taken less pictures, and has stopped taking pictures in recent years. One reason is that his window is limited, and the other is that he faces the harm caused by the world. He is still conducting image research on the Three Gorges and Wenchuan, and these are also typical of the entire China of the times. "The work done by many of our artists is admirable and very difficult to deal with these seemingly mediocre urban realities. I don't think I have done a very good job. I am not targeting a region or an event, but to reveal common real problems."

So, what was the photo taken during this interview with him?

We went downstairs together and walked into the panoramic view of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. How about the nucleic acid team? The line was too long and none of the three people bothered to wait. "It's casual, you can take photos of anything." He was chatting with his old friend and my photography colleague Dashi, "It's not easy for you to still take photos. I don't take photos now." "It's work, just take photos."

"How about taking pictures like this?"

He walked to a red slogan banner, and his whole head was wiped out by the red slogan. He stood upright at the focus of the camera, motionless, still holding the big book. With patience and calmness, we wait together for the birth of a negative.

Southern People Weekly reporter Ouyang Shilei