Any effort to describe the photography of Lu Guang by reference to the work of other artists would almost certainly invoke the name of W. Eugene Smith. (It is, for instance, just about impossible to look at Slide 4 without thinking of “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.”)
“His work is a testament to the power of how a single photographer, armed with a vision, can really [communicate] to the rest of the world,” says Kurt Mutchler, Executive Editor of photography at National Geographic.
Since the reforms, Chinese society has changed. The technical and scientific standards have been raised, and the quality of life has improved overall. But the speed and magnitude of the changes have created new problems, the worst of which is pollution.
One of the most famous Chinese photojournalists has gone missing in China, and there are reports that he was arrested by government security officers. Lu
Documentary photographer Mohammad Baghal Asghari traveled to the Kerman province during ten days of Iranian New Year, creating Forgotten Dried Land, which was nominated for the 2018 International Photogrvphy Grant. Here Asghari shares his observations photographing the plight of people living through the dawn of the sixth major mass extinction on earth.
Photojournalist Lu Guang has been released after nearly a year of detention in China, Voice of America has reported. The news service says the photographer’s wife, Xu Xiaoli, reported via Twitter on Monday (September 9) that her husband “has been home for several months.”
Police in China have for the first time informed photojournalist Lu Guang’s family of his arrest last month, The New York Times reported today. Lu’s wife told the Times that police had phoned Lu’s family in China to report his arrest in the city of Kashgar, Xinjiang province. So far, however, Chinese officials have not disclosed the charges against Lu or released any information about his condition.
Lu Guang is an internationally acclaimed photographer from China, and he has been my friend for more than 15 years. I’m proud that the agency I co-founded represents and distributes his work. We first met in Beijing in 2002. He was already a well-known and widely awarded documentary photographer in his country, and he would soon win a slew of international awards, including some of the world’s most prestigious.
Photojournalist Lu Guang, who has won numerous international awards for his coverage of pressing health and environmental issues in China, has been detained in China since November 3 without word from authorities about his whereabouts or the reason for his detention, according to the BBC and other news outlets in Europe and the U.S.
The rise of China has been accompanied by a voracious demand for raw materials such as oil and minerals, as it has brought widespread prosperity to the Chinese mass, a boom in consumption and in real estate development has led to new demand in home decoration and furniture. Less well known are the unsuspected consequences on the world’s ecosystem such as rhino horn and elephant ivory, even less is the critical threat on the sustainability of Africa’s tropical forest.
But do we know the disastrous consequences hidden behind this prosperity that Lu Guang euphemistically calls “development”? We can always refer the history mirror back to the so-called developed countries, and that is the language of revenge often borrowed by China: “you had abused the Earth enough for a long time, now it is our turn and you have no right to lecture us.”
Last July, while America was coming to terms with the fallout from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, China itself was dealing with the largest oil spill in its history in the city of Dalian. During the spill, a fatal act of bravery was caught on film by
“Had I not taken these picture of Zhang Liang, his sacrifice would have perhaps gone unnoticed and people would not have been aware of the extent of the oil spill,” says Lu Guang in Through the Lens: the Dalian Oil Spill, a short video produced by Greenpeace.
Sometimes, as photographers, it’s bearing witness to difficult subjects that makes our form of expression such a powerful tool and weapon. Lu Guang, the winner of W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China”, has been bearing witness to the huge problems from pollution that face China and the Chinese people.
