As my admired Japanese photographer Ueda Yoshihiko said, “It’s like I press the shutter unconsciously the moment my eyes and body are happy. ” Trust yourself. With this belief in photography, Ueda Yoshihiko insisted on his own method of shooting, and I was deeply infected by his spirit, and thus opened my own style of photography. For photos without myself, I always want to be able to remain free. I don’t have the consciousness of “own work”, and I don’t want to be bound by this idea. The so-called concepts are created based on the success of a certain art or culture, and things that break this established concept are often opposed. However, trust yourself, shoot what you want to shoot, that types of work really belong to you.
In 2020, “ Target Stranger 100”, my latest work, which is contemporary street photography combining drawing and B&W film photography with interrelated questions of identity, place, and displacement. As a photographer and observer, this work records different moments of strangers during this special period we are going through, and getting in touch with strangers was risky at this moment. I used 10 rolls of film to experiment in different shooting environments anytime, day or night, indoor or outdoor. The subject of this work was strangers, so I captured lovers, teenagers, and elderly couples etc… These moments are frozen in the photos, but they always make people feel the emotions flowing in them. What kind of emotion flows? Such emotions are universal and shared by all human beings, even if there is no specific time and place. I could say this is the worldview I want to convey by observing strangers, and to define this worldview, I have no ability still. What the whole series wants to express is a sense of atmosphere, a sense of alienation, and running through the relevance of human emotions at the same time.
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See more work by Yifei Chen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buffjelly/