In the past several years, Hunan photographer Ouyang Xingkai, has been taking photograph of Hongjiang from a cultural observer’s point of view, recording the architecture, people and their lifestyle in this accidentally survived town. More importantly, his photography is not simply documentary record, either a kind of exaggerated way of photography description, a style popular in media nowadays.
Ouyang Xingkai expresses his impression of Hongjiang and its people with a vision full of warmth and mildness. Ouyang Xingkai takes a closer look at the specimen……
Hongjiang, while he shoots pictures. He pays much attention to the details which can truly reflect Hongjiang history and culture, to the relationship between the space and people, to the objects with history trace, which compose Hongjiang distinct lifestyle. In his photograph, you may find the paths up and down the hillside, wood stoves, doors, stoned tanks for firefighting and bacons hung from the window. While Ouyang pick the scene for his photograph, he focuses on various plain appearance of people’s life in the small remote town. The elderly, children and young couples, they seem to live in the past and everything about them is in harmony with the surroundings. They carry on all the cultural practices belonging to this distinct town, festivals and rituals, wedding and funeral ceremonies, neighborhood contacts, and so on, contrasting to the metropolis lifestyle which seem open-minded but truly narrow-minded. In Ouyang’s point of view, Hongjiang is full of flavor of secular life. From Ouyang’s photograph, you can visualize his childhood that he is trying to recall, his emotion that he is trying to experience again but has been wiped by modernization. By these Hongjiang photograph, Ouyang subconsciously conveys his comprehension and attitude of life essence.His comprehension and attitude also include a kind of sympathy, which seems very helpless and desperate, because Hongjiang eventually will be dispelled by the rising concrete jungles surrounding Hongjiang.
