-- Excerpt from "About the Photographs by Luo Dan." Manoa, vol. 24 no. 1, 2012, p. 154-171. Project MUSE.
To photograph the images in his Simple Song project, Luo Dan 骆丹 lived in close contact with people of the Lisu ethnic minority, in the remote, rural mountains of Yunnan's Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture. Lisu villages are on the cultural, linguistic, and geographic periphery of modern China and are often isolated from Han settlements. As a result of proselytizing by Western missionaries in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many Lisu people are Christians.
Luo Dan was drawn to the Lisu people because he saw in their rustic way of life values of purity and authenticity that are missing in modern, industrial society. Beginning in 2010, Luo patiently stayed in remote villages for up to six months. To capture the timeless qualities that he admired in Lisu people, he decided to photograph them using the collodion wet plate process, invented in the 1850s and later replaced by simpler, less costly techniques. Wet plate collodion images can produce exquisite detail, but the process requires a light-sensitive emulsion to be prepared on a glass plate using hazardous chemicals, such as acetic acid and ferrous sulfate. Once the emulsion is ready, the plate must be exposed while still wet, then developed before it dries. The light sensitivity of collodion plates is quite low, so exposure can take a minute or more, during which time the subject must remain perfectly still.
Luo Dan was born in Chongqing in 1968 and graduated from the Sichuan Fine Art Academy in 1992. He is the recipient of several photography awards, including the prestigious Art Award China (AAC) for Photography Artist of the Year 2013, for his Simple Song series; the 2011 Hou Dengke Documentary Photography prize; the Best New Photographer award at the Dali International Photography Festival (2011); the Gold Award for Outstanding Artist at the Lianzhou International Photography Festival (2008) for his North, South series. In addition, one of the images from Luo Dan’s acclaimed Simple Song series ("Simple Song No.25: John Ringing The Bell") was included in the second edition of Phaidon’s The Photography Book (2015), “an unsurpassed collection of more than 550 superb images that represent the world’s best photographers from the mid-nineteenth century to today”. He currently lives and works in Chengdu, China.
More information: Luo Dan’s works in M97 Gallery
