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| On November 30, 2006, I flew to China, arriving there December 1 and spending the night with my new family in Shenzhen. The next day I made a six-hour bus trip to Lianzhou, a smaller city in southern China. I went there to participate in the second annual Lianzhou International Photography Festival (LIPF). I serve on the festival's Academic Committee, but was also in attendance as co-curator of "Saga: The Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen," which made its debut in the People's Republic of China as part of the LIPF's second edition. |
 Opening day, December 5
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| This in fact constituted the very first showing of Minkkinen's work anywhere in the PRC. The space available to us, a large concrete-walled room, sits on the third floor of an abandoned shoe factory, one of three repurposed industrial spaces utilized by the LIPF. |
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With the collaboration of my wife, Anna Lung, who demonstrated an unexpected flair for exhibition design, and assisted by an extremely capable team provided by the LIPF, we created in 48 hours an effective installation of a 50-image mini-version of this 121-print retrospective. We used Epson digital prints that the LIPF had produced from Minkkinen's files and then matted and framed. A first for both the photographer and myself. We found the quality of the prints excellent, certainly suitable for these purposes. |
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| Minkkinen (who made his first trip to China for the occasion) and I both took part in the opening festivities. I gave a public lecture — my first in the PRC — during that first week, a discussion of the internationalization of the photography scene since the late 1960s. Minkkinen received a Special Jury Award, included a small cash prize, for "Saga." (Above: building the false wall. Right: Allan sweeps up. Below, r-l: Nikita Chan of Photography magazine; myself; Minkkinen.) |
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Photographs above copyright © 2006 by A. D. Coleman and Anna Lung. All rights reserved.
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Upon returning to Shenzhen from the LIPF I drafted a report on the festival. A short version appeared in the China Daily (published in Beijing). Click here for that feature story (pdf format). A longer version found its way into the Shenzhen Daily, a weekday English-language newspaper published there. Click here for that feature story (pdf format).
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My involvement with the new bimonthly Chinese magazine Photography has borne its first fruit. This past fall the first issue appeared. It contained two texts of mine: an introduction to what we plan as a long-running column (which will appear under the rubric "Light Readings"), and the first of those columns, a discussion of the photography of Ben Shahn. All my texts will appear in both Chinese and English.
Handsomely designed, with high production values, and with all its texts bilingual, Photography has no current equivalent in China. It's a 21st-century Chinese magazine about photography clearly aimed at the international image community. You can subscribe via the above link; they hope to achieve distribution in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere over the next year.
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| Issue 2 will include my essay about Arno Rafael Minkkinen from the catalogue for Saga, and another column, this one the first in a two-part series on the photo-festival phenomenon. |
In this edition you'll find the text of my essay on Ben Shahn mentioned above, "Ben Shahn:
A Painter's Photographs." (PDF format.) And also "Creating Experiences in an Educational Environment," one of two talks I gave at the Photo Imaging Education Association (PIEA) national conference in Australia last spring. (This one I presented in Sydney.)
The essays I post here remain on the Writings & Publications menu until I post a new issue and replace them, at which point they move permanently to the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, available thereafter to that repository's subscribers. A small selection of my texts will stay semi-permanently on the Writings & Publications menu here, along with links to other work of mine that appears elsewhere on the web.
For your convenience, we've set up an online store through which you can order my books, with a shopping cart, secure credit-card transactions, and other e-commerce frills.
This section of C: the Speed of Light contains brief synopses of recent, current, and upcoming projects and activities related to my work as a critic, historian, teacher, lecturer, and internet publisher.
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