Xu’s images allow us to inhabit the photographer’s point of view, watching and framing the unfolding events through our own devices.Īs a documentarian, Xu is a prolific creator of photobooks, often adapting existing technology to suit his purpose. The only hint of the violence to come appears in the ominous photo of a tank on the last page, seen from behind a tree. There’s so much life, hope for democracy, and anger at the Communist government in these images. As the camera scans for a focal point amidst the crowd of students in the image, we too zoom around the composition, refocusing on one group declaring their hunger strike or another wielding a banner emblazoned with lines from Bei Dao’s poem “Proclamation” (“And we will not fall to the ground / Allowing the executioner to look tall / The better to obscure the wind of freedom”). The act of using one’s phone to view these pictures also implicates the viewer in a way that looking straight at documentary photos does not. Xu’s rationale for printing his images of the protests-still a heavily censored subject in China-as color negatives is simple: negatives are less likely to be tampered with and therefore more reliable than normal photographs or digital media. Negatives revisits some of Xu’s earliest, unpublished material from the beginning of his career: photographs of young protestors in the square, just before Chinese troops opened fire on the crowd on June 4. Suddenly, photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests seem much closer to the present. A quick change of settings inverts the colors on the screen, and the images in this slim volume burst to life.
Yet Xu Yong’s Negatives instructs me to do just that, in order to interact with its dark, eerie images through the phone’s lens. I don’t expect to be reaching for my iPhone when I open a book.
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