Author: You Li
Book Design: Shao Nian @ Public Labor
ISBN: 978-988-71352-3-4
Specifications: 145 × 216 × 15 mm, 216 pages,
clothbound hardcover with rounded spine
About the book
These images do not, in themselves, depend on explanation. Yet the making of this book came with certain external demands. There needed to be a text—something that could explain what these images are, what was photographed, and how they are organized. There needed to be a structure that could be read. These demands came from different places, but they all pointed toward the same thing: making the images understandable.
The photographs remain still, where they are.
They existed before this book, before the text. Even before the shutter closed, these images were already there.
They might be described as emerging from memory, dreams, hallucinations; from visual images that return again and again; from experiences and sensations that resist classification and remain without order. But even such descriptions cannot restore the state in which they were encountered at the moment of photographing. They belong to a private experience that only comes into being through looking.
Such experiences cannot be transferred. Photography is about how you understand the world. It therefore points toward the way seeing takes shape at a particular moment. What the reader encounters is not the meaning of these images, but the way seeing itself takes place.
Certain spaces appear again.
Certain faces appear again.
Certain kinds of light do too.
I recognized them and made photographs of them, in a way that resembles writing, but not storytelling. They were never stories to begin with. I did not photograph them in order to explain them. From the outset, these photographs did not exist for the sake of explanation.
Years later, looking through these photographs again, I find that they still hold that space open, while I have already left the coordinates from which they were made. I am no longer inside the images, no longer within the first person of that moment. Time has altered the scale of looking. It has also allowed me to see what I did not notice then, but can no longer ignore now.
