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A "Flowers" is like throwing a boulder into the quiet lake of time, rippling layer by layer, ups and downs, swinging into the endless depths of memory. Looking back, we always feel that we have received a strong hint before every great change of the times, and there are some people who, unconsciously, with light and intuition, have engraved in the history of the development of the city the ordinary days that should have been scattered in the wind in history, and have retained a footnote with temperature for the space.
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In his book The City: How Man Gathers the Earth, Austrian Markus Eiser writes: "Satellite images of cities are fascinating because many cities play an important role in people's collective memory. ”
Lu Yuanmin is one such person who has recorded the collective memory of the city. But he doesn't seem to be just recording.
"I didn't have any grand plans to shoot Suzhou Creek. It was only because he was working on the banks of Suzhou Creek at the time, that Lu Yuanmin went back and forth to Suzhou Creek every day, and this is how Lu Yuanmin began to shoot the series of works that were later regarded as classic images in Shanghai.
"At that time, the radius of people's lives was very small. Lu Yuanmin said. This was in 1991. "At that time, I lived on Xiangyang Road - now I live in Longbai - in those years, I came to Longbai, and it was far from words. Take No. 57 and sit for a long time. If you go back, you still take No. 57, and you have to queue up at the terminal, and the queue is very long. ”
The first time I happened to take a photo of Suzhou Creek, I suddenly found that the river in this city that was about to face great changes was exactly the same as what I saw when I came with my father in the 50s. This trance of overlapping time and space gives Lu Yuanmin an intuitive understanding of the memory of images. And Shanghai is the set that Lu Yuanmin is most familiar with. Suzhou Creek is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Lu Yuanmin.
However, we can't help but wonder why Shanghai, because in the history of Chinese photography, urban photography has always been a shortcoming. However, with the emergence of large-scale urbanization, the value of the city has been revalued, and the collective memory of the city has been engraved into the process of its own rapid development, becoming part of the legend, and among them, Shanghai is undoubtedly the most eye-catching. We can also understand that Suzhou Creek is not only Suzhou Creek, but also the Suzhou Creek in Lu Yuanmin's lens, the sum total of the Suzhou Creek as felt by Shanghainese, and the Suzhou Creek where memories are frozen, continued, interpreted, chewed endlessly, filled with emotions, and carried out with great difficulty in spiritual narrative.
This is Lu Yuanmin's unique "deconstruction" of space. To this day, most of those images of Suzhou Creek were taken 30 years ago – although the water was still black before the renovation of Suzhou Creek was completed at that time, they still convey a shocking mood and make people unforgettable.
"I can pass two bridges when commuting to work, Caoyang Road Bridge and Wuning Road Bridge, and I always alternate between these two bridges, because then I can see different things. Lu Yuanmin said. He almost didn't think to take pictures elsewhere, but relied on light and intuition to engrave the ordinary days that should have been scattered in history with the wind, the ordinary traces that should have disappeared in the renewal in a hurry, and the ordinary faces that should have passed by and disappeared in the vast sea of people, and retained a footnote with temperature for the space.
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Time may be another dimension of this "master of space art".
"Human memory is not reliable. Even if it's a negative, copied again and again, I even feel that its authenticity will be compromised. Perhaps it is precisely because of this "unreliability" that Lu Yuanmin has left countless images in the past 30 years, leaving a collective memory for several generations of a city.
If you carefully read the Shanghai that is preserved in Lu Yuanmin's images, it is not difficult to find that this Shanghai photographer, who loves the master photographer André Cortez, has made a high degree of refinement of the beauty of Shanghai and its people in daily life in Shanghai, even in a very cramped and restricted environment of a certain era, such as misty air, cramped space, ambiguous light, long and instantaneous waiting, and so on. Lu Yuanmin, an artist with no artistic ambition, has a breathtaking and eternal consciousness, which makes people have a strong and long-lasting resonance with the "ordinary poetry" produced by the city of Shanghai in the past century.
In the "Shanghainese" series, the everyday Shanghainese are the only protagonists in Lu Yuanmin's photographs: a middle-aged woman sitting on the edge of a simple but neat bed playing the cello in the side light, a young mother who lives in a tight house for three generations but is still well-dressed and well-dressed, and a man in the backlight who crosses his little finger and looks at the painting in front of him calmly...... Eyes, clothing, streets, buildings, demeanor, home environment, these dense details are full and moisturized, inheriting the fireworks of the world for more than 100 years. In these Shanghainese, although there is no vigor that is about to come out, there are also ups and downs connected with Shanghai's flesh and blood.
"This place in Shanghai is really exciting. Lu Yuanmin smiled, "On the one hand, the whole city is changing with each passing day, and the changes are also earth-shattering, but Shanghai is so big, there are always some places, which still look the same for decades, like connecting a memory channel between time." ”
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As if echoing the emotional metaphor of the photographer who "relies on himself and the life around him", Lu Yuanmin has lived in an old house for more than 50 years, in an alley at the intersection of Jianguo Road, Xiangyang North Road, it is still the same, and the three-story new-style lane is a place that many foreigners like to rent. They like to rent old houses where the beams of the house are exposed. That's how they're looking for Shanghai.
In the past few years, Lu Yuanmin sometimes went to the alley of Yongkang Road with his friends to take pictures, and chatted about the "little flat head" they played together in the alley of Xiangyang Road when they were children - "You know, those people in the alley, the big names are often forgotten, 'Xiao Fangzi', 'Edamame', these are often remembered. Lu Yuanmin said. At this time, a grandmother who was sitting at the door picking vegetables in the alley of Yongkang Road immediately said: "'Little flat head', move here early." At first, he was stunned, but Lu Yuanmin reacted immediately, Grandma was talking about the "little flat head" in the alley of Yongkang Road, not the "little flat head" in the alley of Xiangyang Road. Yes, "Little Flat Head" is generic, the nicknames in these alleys are generic, and these alleys in Shanghai are also generic.
"Some people say that our old house on Xiangyang Road has not been demolished, which is quite 'unfortunate', but I think it is also quite lucky. Lu Yuanmin joked, "The old house is here, and the memory is preserved." Like me, there are probably not many people who have lived in the house they lived in when they were children haven't changed at all, so I think I'm quite lucky. "This alley is full of many works in Lu Yuanmin's "Shanghainese" series, the house number is there, the grocery store is there, the children have grown up, the adults have become old, and many have left here.
"So there's really no point in taking photos, I don't deliberately pursue anything, I just record some of the life around me, leave a little memory of Shanghai, and help others, keep a little memory. I wanted to capture a little bit of the scene in my memory. As long as the scene in the memory is still there, people will suddenly feel at ease. ”
Such a sentence, listening to Lu Yuanmin say it with a smile in Shanghainese, we also laughed. But laughing and laughing, a little tears came out again.
Lu Yuanmin: Born in Shanghai in 1950, he is a member of the Chinese Photographers Association. In 2007, he won the first Sha Fei Photography Award, and his photographic works "Suzhou Creek", "Shanghainese 1990-2000", "Shanghai Images in Memory and Trance", and "Shanghai in the Film Age" have gained wide influence at home and abroad, and have been exhibited in China, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland and the United States.
Text: Wang Lu
Photo: Lu Yuanmin
Editor: Yang Yanchao