What does a filter-free China look like under the lens of ethnic minority photographers?
Not long ago, the fourth "Hometown Road" Chinese Ethnic Minority Photographer Award came to an end, and Zhong Mingxi, a Lahu photographer from Yunnan, won the "Photographer Award" for his work "Disappearing Skyline".
In this group of works, the photographer focuses on his hometown and records the daily life of his own ethnic group "Lahu in South America" (specifically referring to the Lahu people whose ancestors live in South American Township, Lincang Linxiang District, Yunnan).
Bright national costumes, mysterious ancient customs, lahu gratitude to ancestors, gods and nature, and the impact of urbanization on primitive life are all slowly unfolding in the record of their hometown.
Some of the works in The Vanishing Skyline. The picture shows the old man of Lahu. Photo by Zhong Mingxi
Narimatsu is one of the founders of the award. In Narisong's words, he is already a Beijing Mongolian who "cannot speak in his mother tongue," but the warm memories of childhood spent in the Hulunbuir steppe have never disappeared.
As an adult, he saw too many photos of the so-called "ethnic minority style", but most of these photos were just "style" shooting models, and he could not see the real living conditions and humanistic customs of the local area.
So in cooperation with friends, he decided to create the Chinese Ethnic Minority Photographer Award, so that more outstanding ethnic minority photographers can pick up the camera and record their hometown and ethnicity.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="162" > Narisong and legendary photographer Lu Nan</h1>
Narisong is a Mongolian who grew up in Hulunbuir, and when he was 8 years old, he came to Beijing with his family to live.
In the early 1990s, after graduating from Renmin University, Narimatsu worked as a photo editor in Popular Photography magazine. After that, life went around, but always in the circle of photography.
Now he is known as an important curator and publisher of "Walking on the Frontiers of Contemporary Photography in China", and the artistic director of the 798 Art District Gallery.
That day pine
Back in Narimatsu's youth, because his old profession was Chinese department, he was not very interested in photography at first.
An inadvertent photographic work, The Blind Boy, changed his view of photography.
"Blind Boy" by Lu Nan
"Blind Child" is the work of legendary Chinese photographer Lü Nan. He was the earliest and only Chinese correspondent to be selected by the world-famous photo agency Magnum Pictures.
"Blind Child" captures the moment when a blind child touches a flower, and this work makes Narimatsu realize the value of photography for the first time, and it turns out that it has a artistry that is not inferior to literature and film.
Later, Narisong met Lü Nan. Only then did he realize that the two men's residences were only one street apart.
Lü Nan had been shooting in Tibet for 8 years, sometimes for three or four years without a message, but Narisong knew that Lü Nan would definitely get the best photos and spared no effort to support him. This tacit understanding has made them friends for many years.
Grandmother and granddaughter Lu Nan photo
Lu Nan's shooting is based on a long-term life in the local area, he knows the people under the lens, but also really cares about their lives and destiny.
Narimatsu once said that he was very reluctant to advocate that kind of "style-picking" photography, such as "driving an off-road vehicle to a village, or shooting with a telephoto on the side of the road, or taking pictures at close range that often appears on the Internet at tibetans who prostrate their heads with long heads."
What Nari song appreciates and likes more is Lu Nan's way of photography, which is not so much "photography" as "shooting". He expects a real dialogue between the photographer and the photographer, and such photographs contain the collision of love, faith and culture.
In 2009, he founded an exhibition of ethnic minority photographers with the theme of "Hometown Road", which had only 7 photographers.
The theme of the exhibition is derived from the famous "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by American country music singer John Denver.
Since then, the "Hometown Road - Chinese Ethnic Minority Photographer Award" has been held every two years.
"A total of 55 photographers from 18 ethnic minorities won the award. These photographers are all ethnic minorities, and the subjects they shoot are basically their hometowns and nationalities. What their works reveal and shine is a kind of sincere love for their own people and a deep concern for their own cultural traditions. Narimatsu said.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="167" > from the Aoluguya reindeer tribe to the old teahouse in Kashgar</h1>
If you roughly mark the distance from Aoluguya to Kashgar on the map, you can calculate that the distance between them is about 6,000 kilometers, and there are many "deep lines" on this distance to see the beauty.
Aoluguya belongs to the city of Genhe in the Hulunbuir League of Inner Mongolia, and in the long winter, the minimum temperature can reach more than minus 50 degrees.
Photographer Tu Shaochun has lived and worked in Aolu Guya Township for 50 years, and he has worked as a hunter, a worker, and a deputy township chief. He often went up the mountain with local Evenk hunters to hunt and herd reindeer.
The Evenk are nomadic people who depend on reindeer herding and hunting for their livelihood. After staying in a forest for two weeks to a month or so, the Evenk migrate again in order to give the reindeer better food and water.
In this process, reindeer are both an important source of food and clothing for them, as well as an important means of transportation.
Photographed by Tu Shaochun, the summer "plucked Luozi"
The Houses inhabited by the Evenk people are called "plucked luozi", which is usually covered with birch bark and some branches on a conical frame in the summer, and in the winter, it is covered with chamois or deerskin.
In the vast snow of winter, they and reindeer live by each other. Before leaving, they wore thick fur coats, decorated reindeer, and traveled together.
Preparing to travel Tu Shaochun photo
Along the back of this Chinese "rooster" from Aoluguya west to Xinjiang, there is also a nomadic ethnic group, the Kazakhs.
Kazakh herders living in the Altay region of Xinjiang still maintain an ancient way of life of living with water and grass all year round. Kazakh photographer Selik Muhush spent 10 years photographing the current situation of Kazakh herders and the transition of the four seasons.
When the herders are moving to a distant winter pasture, in order to protect the newborn lambs, the herders will put the lambs into a warm backpack and put them on the back of the camels to ensure that they can survive the winter smoothly.
Photo by the newborn lamb Selik Muhush
Kazakhs move with the pastures all year round, and every place is a new scenery and a new life.
The path that the mighty flock of sheep has traveled is also the path that man has walked, and we can see the trajectory of the cycle of life in all seasons.
The transfer sheep out of the valley is photographed by Selik Muhush
Continue south from the Altay region, about 2,000 kilometers away from Kashgar.
Photographer Kurbanjan Saimati said, "The old teahouse on Ustanbuy Street in Kashgar was originally equipped with windows in the open-air corridors, the walls and carpets were renewed, and the re-emergence of rewap singing in the old teahouses. ”
The rewap of the old teahouse is photographed by Kurbanjan Samati
Under the lens of Palhati Yushanjiang, the rural area of Awati County in the Aksu region of southern Xinjiang is also the origin of Daolang culture, which is a branch of Uyghur culture that can sing and dance.
Photo by Palhati Yushanjiang, a daolang man who can sing and dance
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="170" > the faces of those children</h1>
Under the lens, people are also impressed by the smiling faces of children.
In 2016, Zhong Mingxi, who used to work in the urban area, returned to Nanhua Village in Yunnan Province and took many photos reflecting the current situation of life of the local Lahu people.
12-year-old Gong Zimei is sewing her own Lahu costume, with a simple smile and a full sense of happiness in her eyes.
Gong Zimei, 12 years old, sewing clothes, photographed by Zhong Mingxi
Chang Shengjie, who grew up in a Mongolian family, said: "Mongolian herders are nomadic in the steppe, accompanied by horses all year round, and beloved Mongolian dogs. They live by raising cattle and sheep, and they cannot live without their company for a lifetime. Therefore, Mongolian people have special feelings for animals. ”
A little boy in Mongolian costume, wrapped in a blue robe, a huge fur collar wrapped around his small face, he shyly belly, with his hands on the big dog friends next to him.
In the winter grassland, the two of them may be each other's best partners!
Faithful friend Chang Shengjie photo
Of course, the faces of children are not only innocent and smiling, but also helpless and sad.
This picture is very special, the spring canola flower field, the little girl with the lantern seems to be looking into the distance, next to a donkey is a paper paste, the whole photography style is somewhat absurd.
"The ship does not wait for the guests, the season does not spare people," Luo Jinqian photographed
The photographer of the photograph, Luo Jinqian, who lives in the Zhuang area of Liuzhou in Guangxi, said the rural "pastoral pastoral" lifestyle was already under threat, and the fields were gradually losing their youth labor and becoming barren.
Therefore, Luo Jinqian thought of replacing the "missing" real farming animals in the field with "fake" farming animals, and she wanted to use such a photographic form to express the current confusion facing the countryside.
Within two months, her father had made six animals, including cattle and donkeys, using iron wire, cloth and other materials.
Luo Jinqian captioned this photo as "People are not lazy diligently, and the grain warehouse is full after autumn."
"People are not lazy diligently, and the grain warehouse is full after autumn," Luo Jinqian photographed
But the "six animals thriving" in the hands of the children are in stark contrast to the paper animals.
In fact, there will be a big gap between our imagination of our hometown and the imagination of ethnic minority areas and reality.
It has both mountains and forests, as well as harsh environments, pastoral songs, and faces a severe crisis of survival.
But in any case, this does not prevent us from loving this land, for the people and things that live in this land.
Photographer Ocean records children walking on a sheep gut trail in Tongxin County, Ningxia, which is the way they left home to go to school, which may also be the appearance of many of us who left home, and never returned after studying.
Ningxia Tongxin County Baijiawan Village Ocean photo
But no matter how long and how far we have traveled, when we look back, it seems that we will always see that our hometown is still there, but we may not be able to go back.
Returning to the beginning of the article, Narimatsu rearranged the works of these years' photographic exhibitions into a book called "The Road to hometown", which includes the photographs of 32 ethnic minority photographers from 17 different ethnic groups.
Most of them are ordinary people who have long lived in ethnic minority areas, and their identities are herders, farmers, hunters or students.
All photographers are mainly based on their own ethnic groups, so that the perspective of ethnic minority photography has completed the transformation from "other" to "self", focusing on the changes of tradition, the disappearance of hometowns, the farewell of farming and other themes.
What can go back is the hometown, and what cannot go back is the hometown. In the rush, we are getting farther and farther away from home. "Can't go back" is not only the invisible space homeland, but also the tradition and history, as well as the way of life and lifestyle that once settled down.
In the book "The Road to hometown", we can see the beauty of China without filters, and we hope that this book can take us back to our hometown and return to our hometown.
Free mail Hometown Road Na Song Editor-in-Chief CITIC Publishing House Books ¥148.5 Purchase