In the series of works titled “Moon Door” by Pierre Jean San Bartolomé (also fondly known as Bai Shangren), a very particular stage is presented to us: the lives of those dwelling inside and out of the moon door. These are familiar scenes to Chinese people––the tobacco and liquor stores, hairdressers, adult shops, building material vendors, small restaurants, etc., and the characters are widely recognizable to everybody, although we don’t know them personally. These humble shops, the small-time dealers and manufacturers are the foundation of Chinese urban society. But San Bartolomé’s photography is not news photography, nor is it documenting or explaining a pre-2008 Olympics era. These market street scenes and these people exist, eclipsed by moongates, and they are captured in the Shibali District just adjacent to Beijing’s South Fourth Ring Road. San Bartolomé has approached his artworks as a theatrical director, painstakingly selecting his scenarios, mobilizing the characters of these authentic scenes, and redecorating the night scene with lights to create a stage with each moon door, so that each individual, in the flesh and blood, can dramatically present their version of China’s modernization process.

Viewing the “Moon Door” series of portraits stirs contradictory emotions at many levels, no matter if these contradictions are aesthetically motivated, result from the photographer’s choice of vocabulary, or if they concern the perspective from which the series approaches and observes Chinese society. These contradictions endow the body of works with an extraordinary tension.

First is their aesthetics, reflecting the style of an artful documentarian, one with no qualms about presenting a harsh reality: the lens aligns with realistic scenes of small sellers and workshops, chaos reigns everywhere, aluminum storefronts explode with goods, spare parts tumble out of small bicycle repair shops, a shabby bus stop is shows its crumbling plaster––everything speaks to a life with a sense of reality. San Bartolomé’s photography in no way avoids the harsh reality of humble people, and he not only manifests space as background to his tableau, but he also treats it as a supporting character, which, together with the leading roles, tells its own life story, and functions symbolically.

Opposite aesthetics is the search for fastidious beauty in the composition and the tone of each visual structure. The moon door provides a stage, and every picture is a brilliant mise en scène. Little shops are illuminated in the dim evening light, and become colorful under the flashing lights. The liquor and tobacco stores are richly enveloped by a blue light, the shadows of the goods inside the shops integrating in relaxed harmony with the doors and windows. A pair of lovers passes through a moongate, there is also a blind person; the colors and figures in the background, seeming remote and random, all embody an abstract beauty. It seems that the author is highly sensitive to the color blue, and it is easy to observe the blue light that runs through these 34 photographs. This blue is partly a result of the cold hue reflected from the workers’ light source, and also derives of the blue walls. This blue is brilliant, it is showy, it beocomes an emotional medium that transforms reality into the artistic image. In this series of works, the photographer has meticulously staged the lighting, and treats shadows as if they were choreographed elements of the stage, elements participating in the composition, creating meter and rhythm. Thus, a harsh reality congeals into an authentic, tangible beauty.

Concerning the author’s attitude on the photographic instant, San Bartolomé is ultimately a traditional photographer, adept at capturing the moments that develop the sense of the scene, but he is also a contemporary photographer, designing and creating the  “moment.” But can the “moment” bear witness to fact? The girl in the white skirt, throwing a look towards the lens––the vitality of her youth blossoms in moments like these. These cannot be created, they are reality, and life itself. Our white skirted girl has both hands on her back, one leg bent, and she leans to one side of the moongate, a high building rises in the background, and a red flag sticks out of a bike. The integral composition of the picture, the attitude projected by the character––everything seems to embody the circumstances of a manufactured moment. Alternatively, in the photo featured in the poster, a man and a woman cross the moon door while holding hands, everything has been orchestrated by the photographer like the movements and moments in classical theatre, and in order to reveal the turbulent lives implied behind the gate. San Bartolomé captures the photographic and the choreographed moments, freely alternating between these two moments.

The moon-shaped door is a traditional form in Chinese architecture, a vehicle of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Nowadays, it shoulders a complicated mix of historical and realistic goals. In the year 2008 in Beijing, the entire country, the Communist Party together with the entire population was in preparation for the Olympic Games. Any residential dwellings considered to be eyesores needed to be concealed in a quick and convenient way. Thus, the moon doors, considered as symbols of traditional beauty, were appropriated for the needs of the present. Of the frail and crude moongates in San Bartolomé’s photography, most important is not the moon-shaped door itself, but the places that it conceals, places far removed from the original context of the moon door itself as an architectural symbol of beauty, and thus the moon door becomes a mere imitation of ornament. In fact, it is because of these moongates, that those tiny shops still exist today, and those small retailers are able to continue their lives in peace. Those nocturnal moongates have acted as temporary shelter for a humble people.

San Bartolomé makes the moon door as his point of entry, makes reality a stage, and he invites the characters in his scenes to portray themselves, presenting us with a space and with lives highly familiar to Beijing people, and to all Chinese people. Life itself ultimately provides the liveliest, most rich theatrical plot and caricatures. As a Western photographer, his perspective tends to embody contradictions, this is a perspective well known to Chinese, who watch these unpresuming lives unfolding all around. This representation of contradiction truly expresses their inner feelings. San Bartolomé, in his externalized, dramaticized and aestheticized gaze onto reality likewise manifests an outsider’s point of view. Having worked many years in China as a French cultural official, he has not only witnessed the lives of such common Chinese people, but has also become close to them, and identified with them. However, he still maintains a certain distance, although here he has leapt out of context to observe this space and its inhabitants, and thus he is able to employ such a richness of color combinations and shadow to narrate their story, and to direct those being photographed, which allows them to freely dissociate from their own environment.

Nowadays, the borders delineating various categories of photography, documentary photography or choreographed photography have become even more fuzzy. San Bartolomé’s photography attempts to portray reality and imagination simultaneously, reality is the imagination’s stage, and imagination is the sublimation of reality. The decisive moment in photography derives from reality, yet also from the contrivances of the director. Both coarse and delicate beauty are embodied in the same image, they become mutually interrelated. This is precisely where the tension in San Bartolomé’s photography lies.

- text / Zhu Jiong, Professor at the Photographic Institute of the Beijing Film Academy