Auguries and Ambiguities

Zhang Yue sits alone on a windowsill, her cropped hair is orchid white, her skin is infused with light. Porcelain skin may be considered one of the Ten Commandments of Classical Chinese Beauty yet the children at the orphanage where Yue lives don't want to play with an albino. This high-key image by Beijing photographer and journalist Zhang Lijie offers a challenge to what essayist and critic Susan Sontag described as the "sustained look downward" of documentary photography. Typically documentary photographs are monochromatic images that denote objectivity, purity and facticity. The rhetoric of documentary photography is of contrasts. Most often the subjects are the downtrodden, the diseased, the destitute. Yet Lilie, who has been documenting the lives of disabled people in China since 2006, considers her sitters to be "precious, as it is a privilege to confront issues."