Yan Wang Preston
Mother River
1st Edition
Published on 5. November 2018
Book
Hardback
160 pages
978-3-7757-4447-8 (ISBN)
Description
Mother River is a four-year project (2010-2014) for which the British-Chinese photographer Yan Wang Preston (*1976) photographed the entire 6,211km Yangtze River at precise 100km intervals with a large-format film camera.
As China's 'Mother River', the Yangtze is usually celebrated by idealistic images of iconic places. With Mother River, Yan Wang Preston conceptually undermines the deep-seated preference towards certain river places and their landscape representations. The equally spaced photographic locations produce no picturesque views or sublime concrete structures but a set of accidental and vernacular landscapes that have never or rarely been photographed before. The book tells an epic story of the entire width of China from its western highland to its eastern coast and demonstrates that in an era of abundant satellite mapping and saturated imagery, fresh views can still be attained by conducting ambitious, physical and personal mapping.
As China's 'Mother River', the Yangtze is usually celebrated by idealistic images of iconic places. With Mother River, Yan Wang Preston conceptually undermines the deep-seated preference towards certain river places and their landscape representations. The equally spaced photographic locations produce no picturesque views or sublime concrete structures but a set of accidental and vernacular landscapes that have never or rarely been photographed before. The book tells an epic story of the entire width of China from its western highland to its eastern coast and demonstrates that in an era of abundant satellite mapping and saturated imagery, fresh views can still be attained by conducting ambitious, physical and personal mapping.
YAN WANG PRESTON is the winner of the Syngenta Photography Award 2017 and the Sony World Photography Award 2019.