NOTES ON τHE GUI LIN PHOTOGRAPHS
are from this first year, most of the pictures are in the 80's, although there are
nine from the early 1990's. I was interested in making photographs that came out
of an intimacy with the savage contrast between vertiginous landscape and
peaceful cultivation, absorbing the culture of contemporary life, and reaching
beyond a purely pictorial representation to incorporate and to photograph the
understanding that generation after generation of Chinese artists came to find.
The province of Guangxi, in south central China, is renowned for its megalithic
e formations (formed by the sea) tha
t are unique in the geology of the
world, offering a landscape that looks more like an electron photomicrograph of
the human tongue than any geological formation readily familiar to us. My work
has long been influenced by representations of this arca's singular landscape. I
believe it offers a challenge to one's naturally horizontal way of seeing
In 1984 I applied for, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to live in
China for a year. Using the camera as my tool for exploration, I lived in the areas
around Guilin, absorbing the surroundings as can only be done in an extended
period of time. For more than two thousand years this area has been a muse for
poets, writers, and painters. They came, as I did, to see and experience this
landscape, to make part of it theirs. More than half of the images in this portfolio
In an attempt, on my part, to make photographs more believable than the world,
I make the most elaborately detailed descriptions possible. (Thus my use of the
7xl7 inch negative and the contact print.) Over the years the fictions I have
created through photography has expanded to describe a veritable as well as a
mythical China, both of which are integral to my vision. Guilin has been the
microcosm through which I have investigated and experienced this world.
LOIS CONNER
MARCH 2004
