I love the concept of this
book and do think it an excellent idea to photograph people who take
photographs of other people – and felt instant sympathy when
glancing through the pages of this tome. Very probably because I have
taken such pictures myself. And also, because these photographs show
the ones portrayed as actors on a stage.
In 2014, Elizabeth Heyert,
who lives and works in New York, started to photograph the Chinese
taking photographs of each other. „They shoot incessantly, often
with family members looking on and directing, and with an intimacy
with their environment that borders on stagecraft.“
She traveled to Beijing,
Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, „often wading through enormous
crowds to uncover private moments between people who were strangers
to me.“ Unable to speak Chinese, she remains an outsider, a
spectator. In her words: „I call the project The Outsider
because as a Westerner in the
East, and a stranger in a foreign culture searching for authenticity,
I allowed myself to be a spectator of the photographer/subject
relationship.“
Part of
being attracted to this book results from the fact that I myself have
once been (in 2002, as a teacher of English) a stranger in this
foreign Chinese culture, albeit not searching for authenticity (also:
the idea of searching for authenticity via photographs has so far
never occurred to me) but missing the possibility to communicate
with words. Being unable to verbally communicate while being amongst
the Chinese often felt like visiting a zoo – which, needless to
say, can be fascinating, on both sides. I particularly remember
Chinese children who stared and cheered at me up in the mountains of
Fujian Province – as strange and fascinating as they seemed to me,
as strange and fascinating I must have seemed to them.
For the full review, please go here
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