Ask average Chinese people their preference in subject matter through the lens and most of them will opt for landscape photography.

However, to quite a number of contemporary photographers, it is the urban environment that gives them the greatest inspiration for their work.

So much so that they have turned to the city exclusively to present their own individual understanding of modern society and people.

In his article titled "Facing the City: Urban Photography in Contemporary China," Gu Zheng, a 44-year-old art critic active in recent years, reviews the merits and shortcomings of contemporary urban photography in China.

The article appeared in the latest issue of Literature and Arts Studies.

According to Gu, an associate professor with the School of Journalism at Fudan University, urban photography started to develop in China in the second half of the 1980s.

"At that time, photographers who were attracted to urban subject matter generally conveyed their personal feelings through their work," he said.

Beginnings

Based in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, Zhang Hai'er was one of the earliest avant-garde photographers in this field.

Zhang focused mostly on urban women. Through his dynamic composition and adept use of the flash, he rendered the urban women he pictured as symbols of desire. Through his photography desire became a key word in his vision of urban life.

Meanwhile in Shanghai the "Beihemeng (North River Alliance)" came into being in 1986. It was a group of loosely connected photographers.

Most of its members were young men who were nurtured in the life and culture of the city where they lived, but who rebelled against the spirit of their time.

You Zehong, Wang Yaodong, Mao Yiqing, and Gu Zheng, the author of the article, were representative members of the group.

The members warned each other never to get lost in the superficial splendors of the city, Gu recalled.

On the contrary, they declared that it was their mission to "fight against the distorting effect of modern cities on human nature through the use of their cameras," or "to counter the constant pressure exerted on people by modern cities," as Gu described in 1988 in an article titled "Dream Talks.'

From the very start, these artists were conscious of the inescapable influence of the city upon them, and their emotional ties to it, at the same time. This fact made their efforts to revolt much more complicated.

Photo-documentation

In the 1990s, China's pace of urbanization sped up. Many unprecedented social phenomena came along with the process, which deeply affected people's values and living patterns.

Urban photographers inevitably transferred their focus from individual feelings to objective social realities. With a sense of responsibility, most of them found the need to document the course of urbanization through their cameras.

In the early 1990s, Beijing-based Xu Yong anticipated the imminent tide of reconstruction that would soon change the fundamental semblance of the city, and hence directed his lens at the traditional hutong in Beijing. With a sure eye and telling composition, he presented the imperturbable serenity of the hutong at the twilight of their long existence.

The shadows of modern buildings loom in not very distant backgrounds, and TV antennas peep over the walls of the traditional siheyuan, or courtyard homes.

"All these elements convey the message that the traditional way of life was being irreparably altered by the impact of modern civilization," said the writer Chen Jiangong in an essay called "Xu Yong and hutong."

Xu Yong, who has lived in a hutong for years, since moving to Beijing from Shanghai at age 11, deliberately shunned the activities of the hutong residents in his photos, making the lanes suggest their past even more evocatively. Xu's work later triggered a kind of nostalgic sense of humor among China's photographers.

Photographer Lu Yuanmin traced the living relics of past years in Shanghai with his camera.

Like Xu, Lu holds a strong spiritual link with the city he lives in.

"I can't work anywhere else other than Shanghai," Lu once said to the critic Wu Liang. "Once I went to Beijing and tried to shoot some photos there, but I found myself unable to press the shutter even once in a whole day."

His series of photographs, "Shanghai People in Old Western-Style Houses," presented the portraits of those Shanghai citizens who continued to follow their old life patterns when great social changes were starting to take place.

Lu's another important work is his series titled "Suzhou River." The river, which runs through Shanghai, used to be a heavily polluted and stinking waterway, and the thickly inhabited riverside area was the perfect setting for the drama of ordinary Shanghai people's lives.

The river is now undergoing a massive clean-up project that began in 1998, and the traditional way of life is quickly dying out in the area, being replaced by parks and commercial plazas.

In the early 1990s, Lu shot more than 10,000 photos of all kinds of scenes on and along the river while riding his bicycle along the river to and from work.

Lu is deemed by critics as a very intuitive artist.

"He seems to click his shutter as randomly and unconsciously as we blink our eyes," Wu Liang remarked in a review. "However, the seemingly indiscriminate shots often turn out to be something of compelling force."

"The significance of the works of both Xu and Lu," said Gu Zheng in the article, "is that they both rejected romantic images of the 'modernity' of the city."

On the borderline

In the 1990s, Zhang Xinmin from Guangdong Province was engaged in a huge photography project called "Cities under siege - Chinese peasants' urban onslaught."

Peasants leaving the countryside to seek a living in urban areas is a phenomenon that inevitably accompanies the process of urbanization. Since the 1990s, China has seen a surge of rural people moving into cities.

Zhang started this project in 1990 when he worked for a local newspaper in Shenzhen. He lived in the same community with many young female workers who came there from the countryside to work in overseas-funded enterprises.

Drawn to the realities of their lives, Zhang began to photograph them, and thus unwittingly started an undertaking that was to continue for several years.

"I just want to create some visual images that would preserve these people's story." Zhang said in an essay that appeared in New Weekly in 2001.

The project has three sections: "Villages and Towns," "To the City," and "Cities." With a panoramic perspective, Zhang recaptures how these farmers left their homes and how they melted into city life. The album records both their acceptance and rejection.

While metropolises drew the attention of most of the urban photographers, cities of medium size also gave inspiration to some contemporary photographers.

"City Dwellers," a series shot by Lin Yonghui in Fushun, a city in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, captures the idiosyncrasies of Northeast China's urban life in a sardonic and comic way.

"Quadrangle City," a series by Shaanxi Province based Hu Wugong, Hou Dengke, and Qiu Xiaoming, in 1996, was a co-operative effort to examine the ancient city of Xi'an from a comprehensive point of view. The city under their scrutiny exhibited very different attributes than those along the seacoast.

Individual styles

In the process of documenting the changes of people's lives and urban landscape, the photographers developed an increasingly strong urge to go beyond their subjective individual viewpoints in their work. In so doing, they developed their own distinctive photographic style.

Wang Yaodong, who is a former member of the "North River Alliance," found a unique way to interpret the nature of Shanghai, where he lived during the 1990s.

He took pictures of a special kind of object: the adv ertisement posters seen in every corner of the city. Critics have termed his work as a collection of "images within images."

"A modern commercialized city is inevitably a city of images," said Gu Zheng. "Images for advertisements or other commercial purposes cover its surface. By reproducing and intensifying the impressions of these images through the camera, the nature of modern cities, their embodiment of desire, is strikingly shown."

Luo Yongjin, currently a professor at the Shanghai Branch Institute of the Chinese Academy of Fine Art, has found a new expression in photographic collages.

He takes close-ups for each specific part of an urban spectacle, such as a signature modern building, or a busy construction site, and then puts them together, each in its proper place, to make an integrated image of the whole scene.

In these collages, the different parts of an object are often treated in different ways and under different conditions. For example, in one picture, the lower part of a pillar is clearly presented, but in another, its upper part is just barely seen in dim light.

Critics viewing Luo's collages find they invite varied interpretations.

The collages demonstrate that there is no single angle or single point of view. They bear witness to the fact that things are forever in flux. One impression must give way to the next.

Such dizzying mutation is exactly the essence of modern cities.

(China Daily August 28, 2003)