Lois Conner, Le Shan, Sichuan, 1986

I am interested in landscape and how culture can be revealed through it. These photographs describe my relationship to both the mythical and the veritable China. Either I was born a traveler/adventurer, or my curiosity is insatiable, or both. I am an obsessive collector and observer of the landscape. What initially sends me out into the unknown is often a photograph or painting that haunts me because of its absolute unfamiliarity. What I end up uncovering is unpredictable, surprising, and often exhilarating. Trying to describe that encounter visually through photography is nearly impossible. It's also invigorating trying to twist what the camera faithfully describes into something of fiction. The camera's elongated rectangle can perhaps, with the confluence of light, circumstance, chance, and a dozen other factors, conjure up a world, one seemingly half-imagined, or one that breathes with the life of thousands of years of history. Sometimes it simply acknowledges the beauty of the land. My journey through the Chinese landscape has lasted fifteen years. Although the geographical area that I initially went to explore still holds me firmly in its grip, my perceptions have changed. Guilin has become familiar, though still breathtaking and sublime. It is a real place, where most people barely take notice of the land as they go about their daily lives. The first time I saw representations of the Guilin limestone formations was in an art history class at Yale. Learning that these mountains (which bear a strange resemblance to a scanning electron photomicrograph of the human tongue) are not fabrications of artistic imagination was a revelation. Yet a complex life exists within. For more than two thousand years the area has been a muse for poets, writers, and painters who came to see and experience this landscape, to make part of it theirs. Guilin has been the microcosm through which I have investigated and experienced China, its land and culture; Guilin has offered something tangible on which to base my comparisons. This is where I became a photographer. -Lois Conner LOIS CONNER received a MFA in photography from Yale University in 1981. She began photographing in China with a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984, which led to a limited-edition gravure book, The River Flows Into the Heavens (1988). Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in such public collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1979, Conner received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is represented by the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York and since 1991 has been an Assistant Professor of Photography at Yale.