Sometimes when a reviewer or writer has fallen into love with an image, a person, or an object, our subjectivity deserts us, rather like falling in love…it is an obvious emotional state…decisions become flawed with our bias. Reviews of art are by nature intrinsically subjective, although we delude ourselves that we can be objective… hence it is intelligent, if not wise, to listen to other writers and reviewers, and then construct a collage of the reviewed works of art. Digging through some of the things written about his works, I find a piece that Cristina Del Sesto wrote for the Journal-Constitution (Dark Images of China’s Coal-mining Pollution.
"In his image workers at a Coking Palna (Benxi,China 2007) ghost like figures of coal miners covered in coal dust make it seem as though Teh had traveled to Hades. In another image, a seemingly peaceful sunset over barren trees turns out to be flames from a tar refinery in Linfen, China. These powerful images had their first showing China…"
Reading the Cristina Del Sesto’s article which was an interview with Ian when he was on an assignment in Beijing, I cannot help thinking that for her, a photo has evoked imagery of hell. The same photo of coal miners brought forth a different feeling in me, one of relief. The coal miners had made it. They came out alive. This photo caught a mundane moment in the lives of humans doing very dangerous work. This is one of the appealing things in Ian’s works for me: his photos capture one of the great things about life - contradictions and constrasts. Just a man finishing a day’s work and going home. Nothing can be more mundane than that surely. Or is it?
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