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This project is to make a photographic book, constituted with cityscapes and still lives accompanied with their re-spective texts.
I believe that some inconsiderable personal memories tingle people more frequently than significant historical events do. I also believe that most people’s lives appear completely uneventful to others. At the end of 2006, after reading for the second time Joel Sternfeld’s One This Site, a book juxtaposing landscape photos with brief texts about a series of tragic events in American collective memory, I decided to make a book for another type of memories. I started photographing the sites where some private memories were attached and recording memories that might be meaningful only to their owners.
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This ongoing project has brought me such insights: for the consciousness of having anchored, one tends to establish mutual recognition and confirmation with where he/she lives, chronically or momentarily, by attaching one’s memories to specific sites or objects. An intersection, mailbox or tiny thorn therefore becomes his/her vessel of private memory or stele of personal history. I was amazed by some details when photographing for this growing collection, and finally convinced that they are the irrefutable ratification to the memory owners.
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To simulate the uneventful look of life, I waited sunny days to photograph on the sites where various intimate memories interspersed, hoping to avoid masking the images with the mawkish photographic expressions of a know-all. As one of the results, the sundrenched images contrive into a world of lucid dreams. However, I can not tell whom the dreams belong to.
Zheng Yaohua
March 15, 2008
Translated from Chinese by SUN Yunfan
March 15, 2008
Translated from Chinese by SUN Yunfan
ZHENG YAOHUA
was born in Shanghai, China in 1962. He studied Chinese language at Shanghai Normal University where he received his Bachelor’s degree in 1985. He has been working and living in New York City since 2003. Zheng’s work has been focused on the city; however, he has never considered this limitation to be negative.
2005, one year after his arrival, four of Zheng’s photographs of Brooklyn were selected to be included in a photo book 28 MM: OFFLINE. In 2006, he was awarded first place honor in QMA Seven Train Photo Contest hosted by the Queens Museum of Art. In November 2007, five sets of photographs selected from the project On Their Sites were showed for the first time in a co-exhibition Intimate Distance.
Zheng Yaohua has been fascinated with the ordinary side of common things. His contemplation has sparked this ongoing project On Their Sites.
More work: zeyez.net
zeyezeyez@hotmail.com
