Photographing Deformity: Liu Zheng and His Photo Series "My Countrymen"

Emily Post on Etiquette summarizes a basic rule for civilized behavior:

Q: How do you behave around disabled individuals? A: Ideally, you behave just as you would around a person who has no visible handicap. Never stare. . . . ¹

But any photograph of disabled people must ignore Post's advice: The very act of photographing someone with a disability implies not only intense "staring" but also the decision to record that person's physical impairment for posterity. ² Consequently, an effort must be made to legitimate this decision: Either the photographer or an interpreter must provide acceptable reasons for the images' production and existence. These reasons can be (and have been) established on scientific or artistic grounds and can be (and have been) formulated as emotional or ideological motives. Thus R. Ollerenshaw opens the anthology Medical Photography in Practice with his warning against the illegitimate use of clinical photos. ³ Diane Arbus's "freak" portraits have been interpreted in many ways, including as social documentary and as reflections of her "inner chaos." ⁴ But behind each of these opinions lies a similar compulsion: to justify the supposedly antisocial aspect of images of people with disabilities. Consistent with Post's advice, there is an assumption that because a person with a disability cannot be stared at inoffensively--because his or her body apparently cannot be wholesomely visually enjoyed--the person with a disability cannot be innocently photographed. That is, pictures of disabled people cannot in good conscience be made without a rationalization based on factors beyond what is apparent in the images themselves. It is this assumption that much of the critical literature of disability studies seeks to overturn.

"Artistic" photographs of people living with a deformity, illness, or disability--along with justifications for making and exhibiting these images--have appeared in China only since the 1980s. Before then, China had not produced its own Arbus or Stanley Burns. ⁵ Rather, the government's cultural policy discouraged any attempt to reveal "the dark side of society." Under Mao's direct patronage, a socialist realist art was developed over the 1950s and 1960s with a mandate to create idealistic images of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The Cultural Revolution further eliminated any individual traits in these images, transforming them into symbolic representations of a healthy, revolutionary people uplifted by the Communist faith. The monopoly that this official art held from the 1960s to 1970s established the historical conditions from which developed two subsequent artistic movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "scar art" (shanghen meishu), which depicted human tragedies during the Cultural Revolution, and "native soil art" (xiangtu meishu), which advocated realistic portrayals of ordinary people (albeit still often in a romanticized manner). Both movements contributed to the emergence of documentary photography in the middle and late 1980s as an important component of "experimental art" (shiyan yishu). ⁶ When a group of young artists of that period exhibited their photographs of "human ruins"--lunatics, cripples, prostitutes, and children in extreme poverty--they broke radically from the socialist realist canon. ⁷ Not only did their subject matter violate the taboo against representing the "dark side of society"; their journalistic style and snapshot aesthetics also sharply contrasted with the idealized and polished images ubiquitous in officially sponsored artwork. ⁸

When this type of documentary photography crested in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liu Zheng was still a college student at Beijing's University of Science and Technology. Majoring in optics, he took an elementary photography class and became addicted to the camera. Unsatisfied with the school's offerings on the subject (the course was the only one available), he sought knowledge of photography from any specialist he could find. Hearing that Ma Jinghua, a teacher at the Art Academy of the People's Liberation Army, was good at taking portraits, Liu Zheng tracked him down and began to follow him everywhere. Ma found the obsessed young man unbearable...