Girls by Luo Yang (SIGNED)

Luo Yang, female, born in 1984, liaoning Province China. Graduated from the lu Xun academy of Fine arts, now lives and works in Beijing as a freelance photographer.

“Girls” has been an ongoing photography project since 2007, and has involved me shooting the girls around me in an attempt in which – through the lens of the camera – to grasp some sense of understanding of their lives.

The images included in the “Girls” series charter a period of personal development, with reflections between myself and other girls around me apparent in each shot. Whilst I was growing up, in order relieve myself of loneliness, I tried to find a sense of comfort through the stillness of the photographic image. These images are both private and non-private.

“Girls” is weak and fragile but also persistent and decisive, as the subjects depicted continue to face the tough process of inner growth in a reality ground in friction, full of hope and latent crisis. This duality of fragility and inner strength is a key component to the photographs, where the girls staging is cast into friction with their inner resistence and awkwardness towards being made a subject of. Their own portrayal, after all, is out of their own control, and yet I feel that in this very situation, there is a glimpse of real truth and beauty. Their world is one which is subject to the weight of age and, as the girls lives become intwined with their surrounding society, they find themselves rooted and engulfed within an ever advancing state of uncontrollable perceptions.

I hope that these fragments of lives depicted within my photographs will find a life less tainted within this world, and that therein the girls impending immersion into the struggles of adulthood will remain suspended.