Lu Guang's Photos of Environmental Devastation in China
By Roadjunky, Posted Oct 23, 2009
 by Lu Guang via the National Press Photographer's Association. |
You had no idea it was this bad.
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Last year we wrote an editorial in disgust that the Olympiscs were being held in China, the modern day hell. Some suggested that we were exaggerating a little, that other countries are just as bad.
They obviously hadn’t seen the awesome photography of Lu Guang,
Guang’s images document the industrial pollution that is devastating the Chinese countryside and poisoning those who have to live there. They in turn flee from the enivornmental distruction and end up as sweatshop labourers in factories turning out more cheap consumer goods, a vicious cycle lucidly explained in the Story of Stuff.
Lu Guang’s work is winning him awards and exposing dark Satanic mills in China that should make us all sleep uneasily.
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you know, I’m so glad that I didn’t get that teaching job in china…
If you get the impression that this is all that there is to China, then you have the wrong idea. While there is an element of truth here, there is some very bad pollution and many sub-standard labor practices in China, there is also another side – with a lot of beauty.
Editorial photography should not be about presenting a distorted view – these photos are amazing if you want to present a highly charged political message, but they’re also captured to show a bad picture in the worst possible light, through the use of muted exposure and effects filters.
While I’m in support of improving labor and environmental standards, this type of work, and inflammatory remarks such as “the Satanic mills of China are actually often counter-productive.
Counter-productive to what? Children born with deformities, people dying of terrible diseases, lives of misery?
An element of truth? You’re either heartless or brainless.
the first time i went to China i was young and was in love with the place, unable to hear a bad word against it or its government.
then i went to other parts of the world, i studied chinese at university and returned many times
i found the more i travelled in china, and learnt about it the less i liked china
it is not possible to justify the way the government runs this country, where humans are a commodity worth so little
Lu Guang is doing a great deed.