Text/Figure: Zheng Zhinan and Wang Yuan, reporters of Shandong Business Daily and Subao News Network
This is the middle of the day at Zaozhuang.
"Hissing", Wu Jingli inadvertently took a breath and stopped the car. "I'm going to go down and take two pictures." He smiled apologetically and took the camera out of his back seat bag.
He focused the camera on the boat in the lake. This small boat seemed to him very abrupt. "Why is there a little blue boat in the pond, why not a tattered tin boat?" He said he was a bit like this blue plastic boat, surrounded by green water and grass, inside a pond, such a boat, there was a lot of debris next to it, how to get out?
This is the question of Zaozhuang photographer Wu Jingli.
Wu Jingli is Chinese New Year's Eve years old, and from 2012 to the present, he has focused his lens on Zaozhuang and filmed a series of works such as "Zhuangli Zhuangwai", "Chinese-style Internet Life", and "Dog Apprentice", reflecting the unnoticed daily life in the urban change. However, Wu Jingli also admitted that although his shooting theme is Zaozhuang, it has nothing to do with Zaozhuang, and there are many small cities like Zaozhuang, "Taking pictures is actually a reflection of their own problems, their own inner struggles and conflicts." ”
In the winter of 2016, one of the festivals "Chinese-style Internet Life" in the Internet café. Photo by Wu Jingli
Internet café owner
As a photographer, he first took a reporter from Shandong Shangbao and Subaoxw.com to visit his Internet café. This is somewhat "unprofessional", as someone told him when he first picked up the camera to take pictures.
We met at a large supermarket in Shizhong District, Zaozhuang City. When we met, it wasn't cold yet. Near noon, a young man wearing a long-sleeved shirt and shorts on his upper body came over, and that was him. He is of medium stature and wears a round black fisherman's hat on his head. The brim is narrow and does not shade the light. He was round and the corners of his mouth were raised. Seeing the reporter of Shandong Shangbao And leopard news network (subaoxw.com), he laughed first.
"Let's go to the Internet café first." Perhaps because of the day, there are no people in the Internet café, and it is empty. Rows of computers and sofas are neatly arranged. After the transfer of the Internet café, he returned here for the first time. You can see that he is a little excited. Out of sight, a man emerged from behind the computer, in his 30s, smiling and saying hello. This is a former regular customer.
In 2015, Wu Jingli and others partnered to open this Internet café, and in 2019, it was transferred. The person who took over had no intention of changing everything about the Internet café, just like two years ago. Wu Jingli displays the Internet café like a child showing off his beloved toy. A submarine was converted from a gas canister and hoisted above the cash register. Propellers and chains, motors make up the mechanical style and vintage tones, and exaggerated tools hang from the barbed wire. Small iron airplanes with front propellers, hung in rows.
"The decoration was influenced by Takeshi Kitano." He once went to Shanghai to see an exhibition, and happened to see Takeshi Kitano doing an exhibition, and he liked it. When I opened the Internet café, I remembered it again, so I learned Kitano Takeshi. Walking up to the second floor, on the wall facing you is a three-meter-long Guernica. This is Picasso's masterpiece. This Cubist surreal painting depicts the german bombing of Picasso's hometown during World War II. Dora Mar, the photographer who watched Picasso finish his painting, once said, "The whole painting is a huge photograph." ”
Under this "photo", Wu Jingli, the owner of an Internet café, pointed the camera at his own Internet café. Wu Jingli jokingly called himself a "senior victim" of an Internet café. At the end of 1990, the teenager Wu Jingli began to play online games. Since then, with the popularity of online games, he has also become a regular visitor to Internet cafes. "I've played basically online games. It's not about being a great player, it's just a simple obsession. ”
In the photographs taken by Wu Jingli, the Internet café became a stronghold for young people in the small town. These photographs freeze the youth of these people.
Outside on a rainy night of lightning and thunder, the lights are bright. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, young people in their twenties, they soaked here. They have fashionable hairstyles where the barber pulls out the dividing line of the suit with a razor. The game is clearly the theme here. Under the smoke, a pair of eyes stared at the game screen on the screen, while the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci on the wall was watching them. They're here to fall in love, order takeouts, brush their teeth and wash their teeth, and here they take naps and sleep on the couch. Their eyes were red, and they made funny gestures at the camera.
Wu Jingli said that many of the people who come to the Internet café to access the Internet are marginal people who are running away from something, and the Internet café provides them with an environment for temporary stay. In the virtual world created by the game, they can gain confidence and satisfaction that they cannot get in the real world.
This is the Internet café in Zaozhuang, and it is also an Internet café in China. Every day, such scenes are staged in Internet cafes across the country. Some netizens gave a similar evaluation after seeing Wu Jingli's works: extremely real.
In January 2017, one of the railway lines in the urban area, "Zhuangli Zhuangwai". Photo by Wu Jingli
Coal miners
"In 1922, my maternal grandfather (my mother's grandfather) opened a photo studio in Zaozhuang."
Talking about the reason for his photography, Wu Jingli always has to tell the story of his family. The family is associated with coal mines.
This is Zaozhuang, a city built because of coal and prosperous because of coal. The territory of Zaozhuang City was originally under the jurisdiction of Yi County and Teng County. In 1958, the yixian government office was moved to Zaozhuang Town. In 1960, Yixian Was changed to Zaozhuang City at the county level. The following year, it was upgraded to a prefecture-level city. According to its city records, as early as the Tang and Song dynasties, coal mining activities had already occurred in Zaozhuang. In 1908, the "Shangban Shandong Yixian Zhongxing Coal Mine Co., Ltd.", referred to as "Zhongxing Company", was established here, and until the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, it was the largest Chinese-funded coal mine in the country. In 1912, the Articles of Association of ZTE were officially implemented, which stated: "The company's main mine is in Zaozhuang, north of Yixian County". At this point, Zaozhuang gradually became famous.
Coal grew, immigrants poured in, and local commerce grew with it. At the beginning of the 20th century, the families of both Wu Jingli's parents came to Zaozhuang. "They're all here to make a living." Wu Jingli said that his grandfather was born in Henan, and when he was young, he went to Tai'an, Shandong, and later to the Zaozhuang mine, where he has since taken root. "My grandfather's side first opened a foreign firm in Jinan, and later opened a printing plant in Zaozhuang."
In 1922, Wu Jingli's grandfather opened a photo studio in Zaozhuang, named Rui Taihe.
In 1938, the coal mine in Zaozhuang was occupied by the Japanese. A Japanese photographer in the Japanese gendarmerie team recorded Nanjing in 1937, and this Japanese photographer found Wu Jingli's grandfather to enlarge the photo, and the grandfather was very sad to see the photos of his compatriots killed, and secretly enlarged two copies: one was given to the Japanese photographer, and one was kept by himself. Unexpectedly, the Japanese photographer suspected that the grandfather was secretly hiding the enlarged photo, so he sent the gendarmerie to arrest him. "The store was sealed, smashed, and the outside too public relations went in." Through dredging, 20 pieces of ocean were taken and rescued. ”
Wu Jingli's grandfather closed the photo studio. Photographic equipment and preserved photographs were lost in the long years that followed.
After the founding of New China, Zaozhuang's coal industry developed and grew. Public information shows that in the entire planned economy period, the state has transferred 400 million tons of raw coal from Zaozhuang, and in the 1980s, Zaozhuang supplied more than 50% of the coal in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, and the leading coal-related industries once accounted for more than 80% of the economic structure, so Zaozhuang was also called "coal city".
In the eyes of local citizens, the Lu D license plate is a clear proof of zaozhuang's glorious period.
Wu Jingli's family also flourished with the development of the city. In the 1990s, with the long period of high-intensity and large-scale mining, Zaozhuang City's coal resources were increasingly exhausted. In 1999, zaozhuang's main coal resources were on the verge of depletion, and the proven coal reserves were declining year by year, and the pillar industries began to shrink. In 2009, Zaozhuang was identified as the only resource-depleted city in the eastern region. In 2013, it was included in the list of key transformation cities of China's old industrial cities by the State Council.
In a cultural square in zaozhuang city' central district, coal mining trucks and derricks were exhibited in kind. An old man sat next to a minecart, basking in the sun. A train rumbled along the railway. To this day, there is still a railway in the city of Zaozhuang, which "divides" the city. Wu Jingli said: "You have to run many times a day, and in the morning and evening when the traffic is rushing, you will also set up a barrier on the traffic artery. ”
Seeing the reporter and Wu Jingli discussing the minecart, the old man basking in the sun opened his mouth. "It's running in the mine alley. Like today's trains, there is an overhead line on the upper side. The alleyways are transported with belts. The old man is in his eighties, once a coal miner, "the underground is very hard, wet and watery."
The old man said that before, all the mines under our feet were mines, but now they are gone. Resources are exhausted, the city is transformed, as an ordinary citizen, Wu Jingli once had a sense of loneliness: "The young people are gone, and the people who are left are the old people." ”
"Why is that?" In 2011, with such questions in mind, Wu Jingli, who was 20 years old when he graduated from college, had an impulse in his heart that he wanted to document the city's changes. Thus, there is a photographic work "ZhuangLi Zhuang Wai".
Inside and outside the village
This is a Bresson-like photograph.
In the summer of 2013, in an urban village in Zaozhuang City, the fire valve suddenly burst open and water gushed out. A girl used to splash in the water. A van drove up, intending to "borrow light" to wash the car, and the girl hurried to dodge.
At this moment, Wu Jingli pressed the shutter to record this small "decisive moment". As the French photographer Bresson famously said, "The moment you press the shutter, it's the photographer who creates it, oh... Yes, that's the moment! ”
"Bresson-like photographs are predicting what kind of photo will definitely appear in a certain situation, and the photographer waits for that moment." Wu Jingli said that his path of photography began by imitating the master of photography.
In 2011, with the support of his family, he bought a camera, went to a store in Shanghai to buy a picture album of the photography masters, bought 50 copies in one go, put it in a trolley box and dragged it back to Zaozhuang. Place the album on the ground one by one, watch it repeatedly, speculate, and then shoot it.
In addition to reading the album, during that time in Zaozhuang City, there appeared a young man with a camera shooting everywhere, a young man who discovered a new world. He thoroughly enjoys taking pictures, "especially comfortable, relaxed and enjoyable." He remembers walking 28 kilometers at most. Go out and shoot every day. This state of affairs lasted for two or three years.
Finally, he had his first "finished photo". The themes are sculpture, steps, old people. The sculpture sculpture in the square is a group of running people, in the gap between their legs, an old man practicing in the morning slowly walks by. Wu Jingli recorded this pace. He explained that at the pace of the times, we seem to be slowing down a bit. The structure of the whole picture is also a reference to the work of the master, that is, with the help of the sculpture's legs to build a frame.
"Who would have thought to look at it from that perspective?" Wu Jingli still remembers the scene when the photo was taken. Then, more such moments. His lens is a moment of ordinary people in Zaozhuang. The elderly, the young, the fashionable, the simple, the urban youth, the peasants who have come to the city... He also saw himself in the vanity mirror that an old man was holding.
Under his lens, a middle-aged man with a sad face crouches on the side of the road, and the wind blows his hair; the nocturnal motorcycle leaves a residual shadow; the wall behind the old man in the hat is full of messy advertisements; the man who pees in the alley; the passenger who takes off his shoes and puts his foot on the window; the person sitting on the ruins; the owner of the scrap yard, lying on a broken sofa and snoozing; the man riding a bicycle and wearing sunglasses; the woman who walks on the road and hits an umbrella; the person in the sun, the person in the shadow; the person lying down, the person sitting, the person standing...
In the end, 88 photos were collected into "Zhuang Li Zhuang Wai". After the release of this group of photos, there was a lot of praise in the industry, and Wu Jingli became the "Top Ten Emerging Photographers of the Year" in 2013.
However, the jujube in the photo is not "good-looking", but some "broken" and "not good-looking". This puzzled many people who lived or lived in Zaozhuang, even around them. On the Internet, there are also many voices questioning him.
"In particular, zaozhuang people who have lived in other places for a long time are unwilling to see others say that Zaozhuang is not good." While chanting jujube villages, they all went to work and live in other places, and their parents also followed after they retired.
It's an awkward thing to do. "Wu Jingli said that these people could not understand the feelings of the people living in Zaozhuang at that time." The hometown is good, the life is comfortable and even a little idyllic, but these also have a price. "Of course, at that time, he just wanted to take pictures and didn't think too much.
This was almost 10 years ago. After graduating from college, in addition to taking pictures, he also worked in various jobs, such as baker, stevedor, floor stall, tally clerk and so on. "My first job was bread making, and my first month's salary was $250. He framed the 250 yuan in plastic film and hung it on the wall.
At that time, Wu Jingli, like many young people in small cities, was uneasy about life in small cities, "always wanting to go out and jump out", but there were various reasons for them to stay.
"My own mind is also struggling, so I took a dog fight, and this kind of photo can reflect my own inner things." 」 He said.
Before filming the "project" of "Dog Apprentice", Wu Jingli never thought that he could see this scene again. As a child, about seven or eight years old, he had seen a dog fight, just like the onlooker in the photograph he had taken. He remembered that the bloody scenes of dog fighting frightened him.
In 2014, by chance, he saw dog fighting again around a certain place. "Isn't there always a fight between people?" Wu Jingli saw the dog fighting again and had the urge to shoot. "In the case of dogs, in the arena, either win the game or get bitten to death by other dogs."
On a rainy winter day, cold woods surrounded a clearing with an iron cage with an open door. Everything is gray. A dog fight has just ended, and all the dog fighting equipment is on the ground, except for the dog fighting man and the dog. Wu Jingli said that this is the most important photo in his "Dog Apprentice". He said that although there is constant confrontation in life, it is always necessary to find a balance.
Blue boats
From "Zhuang Li Zhuang Wai", "Dog Apprentice", "Internet Cafe" to the "Disappearing" he is now filming, in the nearly 10 years of shooting time, he graduated, worked, married, and had children. As you grow, cities change.
In Wu Jingli's eyes, Zaozhuang was doing experiments. "First of all, the ancient city of Taierzhuang, the transformation to tourism and cultural transformation. Now it is a 'prosperous city of industry and a strong city of industry'. "As a citizen, of course he wants his city to get better." A few years ago, Xuecheng District built a Wanda, at that time can be happy, finally there is a decent theater, before to see an IMAX movie to run to Xuzhou, to Jinan. He said that his biggest hope now is to grow up with the city, to do something for his hometown, and to make his hometown better.
Every time he came back to a big city, Wu Jingli would have a gap. "Why are there so few people on the street?" "My friends, friends from childhood to adulthood, and those friends who came to look for work, grew up from here and left, worked for two years and left, why didn't they all keep them? He's now working on a set of works called 'Gone', and this question is also one of the themes of the work.
He took reporters to visit bars, restaurants and other places opened by his friends, "We young people went to the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, felt the life there, and could also reproduce the city." ”
"This bar has been renovated three times since it opened." Wu Jingli said that young people in small cities are also pursuing excellence, "doing something to the extreme", only by constantly moving forward and the quality of life is getting better and better, can we better serve the city, cooperate with urban development, and attract more young people to return to their hometowns. When he said these words, he was much like a local official who was eager to attract business.
On the one hand, looking forward to the development of the city; on the other hand, "Zaozhuang Xiaowu" is a bit lonely.
At Zaozhuang, it was difficult for him to find a group of people who shared a common topic in photography. "People who don't talk, people who don't have a common topic." Wu Jingli said that although there are acquaintances everywhere in the small city, everyone is not in a circle. Instead, it is through the Internet to chat with like-minded people about some related things, which has become a good social circle.
The subject of Wu Jingli's photography is undoubtedly Zaozhuang. He had no intention of leaving. The small city where he was born and grew up in Zizi gave him the greatest inspiration. "My theme is Zaozhuang, but it has nothing to do with Zaozhuang, and there are many cities like Zaozhuang. Taking pictures is actually a reflection of my own problems, my own inner struggles and conflicts. He said he was using the camera to express what was in his heart.
At noon, he drove and roamed the Zaozhuang. Pointing to a lake, he said, it was also a subsidence area, which later became a garbage dump and was converted into a wetland park two years ago. Speaking of the changes in the city, he was still very happy. Like a tour guide, introduced.
"Hissing," he said, and he inadvertently took a breath and pulled the car to a halt. "I'm going down to take a picture, and I saw a boat that was fun."
"The light and shadow are very suitable now." He said he liked two kinds of light, one cloudy and the other at noon, when the sun was in the middle.
The reporter followed him out of the car. The road is lined with ponds, aquatic weeds, boats, and mountains in the distance, but nothing special is seen.
He focused the camera on the boat in the lake. This small boat seemed to him very abrupt. "Why is there a little blue boat in the pond, why not a tattered tin boat?" The blue color of the boat is incompatible with the whole environment, and there is a sense of conflict. He said that he was a bit like this blue plastic boat, surrounded by green water and grass, inside a pond, such a boat, there was a lot of debris next to it, how to get out? He still seemed to be looking for someone to punch the boat out, or an intrinsic motivation.
Asked about Wu Jingli's most satisfactory photo, he said it was "the next one." Just like Pele, the king of the ball.
Shandong Business Daily And Speed Leopard News Network Editor Zhang Lei Xu Xiaoyang