SHE came a decade ago to capture China but instead China captured her. American photographer Lois Connor, here for the opening of her solo exhibition at Hanart, acknowledges that nothing she had read or seen prepared her for China in 1984.
'I didn't make the photographs I expected - they didn't exist,' she said.
Her first trip stretched to eight months and unexpectedly opened the door to a project which has brought her back half a dozen times and which Connor guesses 'will take all my life. In a way I've just begun'.
Connor returns each time with a sense of urgency to photograph 'the disappearing China'. Streets she has pictured in Beijing are now gone. The hotungs and small shops are being gobbled up by development.
Like Atget who tried to possess, through his photography, all of old Paris, Connor would like to possess China, but knows it is an impossible task. Especially if you have to lug a turn-of-the-century banquet camera around plus over hundred pounds of equipment and film.
Connor's camera is a burden and a benefit. It draws a crowd of gawkers and slows her down, but she wants to slow down. 'I need time to understand what I'm looking at.' Her contemplation becomes ours: we pay attention to her 7 x 17 inch platinum prints and the almost microscopic detail she is able to freeze in the rush of life.
Even a quick look at her photographs shows this is not your usual travel photography. Balcony and hotungs crammed with the discards of urban life, a web of telephone lines - not your mail order exotica and the picturesque. 'I am not interested in illustration,' she says. 'I am interested in making a portrait.' Her goal is a portrait of China not a series of pristine landscapes. Her work is 'about people who put their marks on the land - the path humankind makes through the land'.