Our Moments, Create Together
Artists: Jonas Bendiksen, Martin Parr, Michael Halsband, Michael Yamashita, Xiao Quan and other vivo VISION+ Creators
The special thing about this image exhibition is that all the works presented were captured via smartphones from 2020 to 2021. In addition to its original meaning of a very short period of time, the word moments also refers to the name of a familiar WeChat function (similar in scope to Facebook’s Stories). WeChat’s Moments keeps the images of our lives in chronological order and forms the prospects of an entire year based on images alone.
Martin Parr turned his mobile lens on the coast of his hometown and photographed people sunbathing on the beach, reminding people of his famous The Last Resort series. He also focused on the blue electric scooter that has become a necessity for his travels because of his physical limitations; the bird waiting on the doorstep of the ice cream parlor for an opportunity to steal food; his random thoughts when sitting in a car; and looking into the window on a standard rainy day in the UK. Michael Halsband took photographs of his friends in his New York studio. Xiao Quan chose to shoot the craftsmen in his hometown of Chengdu. Jonas Bendiksen photographed a camping of his family. Michael Yamashita stepped into a helicopter in order to shoot a sunrise in the city where he was born and raised…. With these artists’ strong personal character, their photos share their ordinary lives. It is these trivial moments that bring us closer to the person behind the labels. As Michael Yamashita elaborated, “I spend most of my time shooting the selections around the world as a National Geographic photographer[;] however, I wanted to do it for my own storytelling experience. When I was young, I went to many destinations with dreams, but this time[,] I wanted to photograph the dreams and where it all began.”
In addition to these masterpieces, the exhibition also presents outstanding selections from among 384,878 works of the 2021 vivo VISION+ Project. Each period has different people holding up the stage, and they all believe in the power of images — fair as the sun — that everyone has the ability to sense and create. It is these moments that make us involuntarily stop and snapshot our noisy world. The images we capture therefore become our eternal private collection, melting the tedium and hardship of life.
“It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art,” Erwin Panofsky wrote in his famous article about film. What kind of influence will mobile phones exert on photography or even other forms of art? The answer is still up in the air. Here, though, images are allowed to rid themselves of the narrative context of a project-oriented system, thereby returning them to their powerful origins and the moments that belong to their creators.
By Ma Xinyi
