French Photographer Marc Riboud visited China 22 times over the course of 5 decades. Yet, he did not seem interested in composing a grand, sweeping narrative of a country in the midst of tremendous political changes. Instead, he acts more like a cultural conductor whose exhibition La Chine de Marc Riboud invites passengers of his portraits to board a bumpy train ride through China’s past in quiet comfort.
Although this historic journey is full of fast-moving twists and turns, Riboud’s camera uncritically peers out from the windows of time to offer us glimpses of the constantly changing landscape of Chinese progress, a setting that seems to pass by its citizens with heart-wrenching speed.
Despite this, Riboud is able to capture brief, moving moments of still-life solidarity with a culture whose rich history is usually framed within the context of “the collective,” and in doing so, personalizes a human movement that is larger than any one person’s life. This is La Chine de Marc Riboud, as presented by the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum.
Marc Riboud’s work is surprising in its simple, straightforward, and honest approach to the craft of photography, but perhaps this is also to be expected from a man who once claimed that, “The eye is made to see and not to think. A good photograph is a surprise.” Lorène Durret mirrors this approach in the curation of this exhibition.
Located in the small alcove of F hall, La Chine de Marc Riboud takes a no-nonsense methodology to presentation. You won’t find any trendy lights or new media installations here,
just 36 black and white pictures in a dimly lit room. Yet, this is okay- there is a subtle, raw power to these images that a flashier exposition would detract from, and by keeping it classy, the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum allows a viewer to walk directly into a timeless vision of China that very few foreigners ever set foot in, let alone photographed.
And that is the truth. Marc Riboud was one of the very first foreign photographers to enter China in 1957, and would repeatedly return to document the people and the changes taking place with a lens of great respect.
Although his career took him around the world, from the throes of the Soviet Union to the chaos of the Vietnam War, Riboud wasn’t interested in politics, only people, and his work offers no opinions, only observations. Instead of photographing political rallies or the speeches of great leaders, Riboud would inhabit tea shops, mess halls, and busy city streets.
For Riboud, “The best way to discover China is perhaps to use one's eyes. Intense attention to detail and to the moment, here even more than elsewhere, can lead to knowledge and understanding.”
It is this precise attention to “the human condition” that allows Riboud to blur the boundaries between photojournalism and creative photography, and paint a portrait of a place constantly on the edge of reinventing itself.
In his approach to life and art, Riboud echoes his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most critically acclaimed photographers of that era and co-founder of the now legendary Magnum photography collective in 1947.
As his protégé, Riboud learned valuable technical and cultural skills from this eminent “salutary tyrant” of fine taste (as he called him), and eventually even became president of Henri Cartier-Bresson's Magnum Photography collective. At the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, witnessing how close their art is to each other is both metaphorical and literal. Teacher and pupil are posthumously united once again within separate, nearly adjacent exhibition rooms, and seeing the similarities is as easy as walking down the hallway of the repurposed French-style villa from one exhibition to another.
Yet, Riboud’s past was different from that of the affluent and sophisticated Henri Cartier-Bresson, and elements from his more blue-collar background make their presence known in his work. After graduating from University in 1948, Riboud became a factory engineer in the town of Villeurbanne, France. There, he internalized the right-angles of this industrial profession, and later applied it toward crafting his portraits. Riboud once claimed that, “good photography” was dependent on “good geometry,” and evidence of his intentional methodology can be seen in the curation of La Chine de Marc Riboud.
His pictures gaze out from crafted shop windows in Beijing, peer down from tidy-edged pipelines in Anshan, and stare wondrously upward at a cathedral of intersecting car lanes in Shanghai. This presents a structured, scaffolded perspective of our modern world that flawlessly frames the messy, imperfect nature of the individuals living among it.
Antique Shop Window, Beijing 1957，图源：网络
Bridge in Shanghai, 2002，图源：网络
四层立交桥可能是上世纪末中国城市的大教堂， 摄于1995年，图源：网络
In a particularly poignant piece that illustrates this point, Riboud photographs his own son standing tall and proud on a recently built bridge in Shanghai, 1993. There are no cars, no pedestrians, only a boy with his hands optimistically out-stretched toward the heavens, center frame. Although he appears bold, strong, and defiant, Riboud’s son is almost entirely eclipsed by the steel arms of a man-made structure that threatens to completely encompass him. In the midst of this cold embrace, his barely visible human shape transforms into a silhouette, all-alone on a fading horizon, with a gaze that seems to stare back at us through the fog of time.
Even though Marc Riboud died in 2016, his legacy lovingly shines through in this exhibition, which is carefully curated by both his long-time collaborator Lorène Durret and presented by his friend and director of the Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, Jean-Luc Monterosso.
The devotion to the details of the past by those who personally remember it can be felt in each photograph dotingly displayed on the walls of the Chengdu Image Museum, and serves as an appropriate tribute to both La Chine de Marc Riboud and to the memories of all those who live on through his photographs. If Marc Riboud truly is a cultural train conductor, then his photographs of China operate to safely transport us across this precarious, ever-expanding bridge from the past to the present, and demand that we do not fearfully close our eyes along the ever-quickening journey, lest it become lost in time.
Riboud wrote in 2000, “My obsession is with photographing life at its most intense as intensely as possible…taking pictures is like savoring life at 125th of a second.”
一个鞍山的工厂，这里有大量的煤炭资源并建有大量的练锅厂摄于1957年图源：网络
Even though our own individual journeys through life may be fast and uncertain, we should try to observe as acutely as possible, take in the scenery, and enjoy the ride while we can. But this is also a reminder that the hazy horizon of our shared histories moves in both directions. As the train of Chinese progress charges toward the future, we also leave behind a billowing trail of memories that covers the tracks, blurs the past, and threatens to be forgotten if we don't look back every once in a while and remind ourselves, from time to time, from which direction we came from.
Shanghai Ballet Dancer, 1971
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