For more than twenty years, photographer Feng Li (born 1971) has been documenting the people and backdrops of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, and one of the fastest growing cities on earth. During the day he works as a civil servant for the Chengdu Department of Communication, acting as a custodian of ‘official’ reality. The story told with his government-issued camera has been one of a great acceleration proceeding according to plan.
But after Feng’s work day is over, he takes a different kind of photograph. In 2005, while shooting a light festival in a remote suburb of Chengdu, Feng became enraptured by the rural twilight. The site was devoid of visitors. A Christmas tree the height of a ten-storey building stood before him. The sky was so overcast it was unclear whether it was night or day. ‘From that point on,’ Feng told Granta, ‘I felt that the world provided me with abundant inspiration, it was a huge stage with wonderful scenes always unfolding.’ The result became his ongoing photography series ‘White Night’, where he has registered the less official realities Chengdu has disclosed to him.
Feng is self-taught. Originally studying medicine, he began experimenting with a Nikon FM2 that his wife saved up for a year to buy him. The telltale style of his photography is the way he bathes his subjects in a strong flash, like a crime scene photographer. ‘Photoflash is like a projector on a stage,’ he told Photography of China. ‘It highlights the things I want.’ The heavy light rewards Feng’s instinct, allowing him to shoot instantly. But his work is largely free of forensic menace. Any sense of staged-ness appears more like cooperation between photographer and subject rather than something directed. Feng is attracted to the ways those around him have found their footing in the crashing waves of a rapidly assembled consumerist society: ‘Where there’s people, there’s drama.’
Feng says his work deliberately forgoes context: he prefers not to label the photographs. The harshness of his flash renders his subjects similar, no matter how eccentrically they impress themselves upon his camera. In these images, people find themselves more unguarded and more strange. Feng sees no way to close his series, the title of which alludes to a passage from the Book of Job: ‘They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.’ This is not a dilemma. He plans to continue adding to it. He has no shortage of supplies.
Introduction by Granta
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