Chris Lee

Chris Lee travels around the world to different countries each year to capture modern culture. The results are then compiled into one book, which offers a combination of photographic styles. He connects with my project really well as I focused on the Chinese culture and how to modernise it. He is a professional photographer based in New York City. He specializes in performing arts with ardent focus on the world of classical music since 1987.

Chris is someone that has definitively inspired me to do this project, he showed me the potential that culture can be modern if you put it in a specific way. For instance, me doing a photoshoot of one of my models in central London wearing a traditional dress and breaking the law of having it left alone I added a heavy-duty chain and a high-end fashion hoodie. Chris Lee does a similar thing of having a cultural person such as a young Chinese boy having his haircut done under a bridge rather than at the barbers. This questions the reality and makes it seem normal. I want to discuss the relation between the barber in this shot and the boy. He doesn’t seem scared because of his facial expression. He doesn’t seem annoyed because of his body language and the Chinese barber looks delighted that he could cut his outdoors, it could have been for the shot but if this was all natural then Chris Lee was really lucky to find this scenario happening.  The shot in my opinion could have been improved by setting the scene more and having the background more visible, for example I am personally curious where is all this happening however on the other hand the facial expressions would of not been so visible and in this photograph the focal point is the two people in the middle and not the background so therefore it can be argued that Chris Lee had thought of this composition being ideal. 

 Another example of Chris Lee’s photograph is this photo below of a Chinese girl looking at her phone. There is not much happening in this photo however she could be doing anything on her phone, she could be calling the police, looking at social media, ordering a cab or stalking someone. That is the power to unexplained photography, if there was a caption then everything about this shot could be easily understandable however there isn’t one so imagination runs through our mind non – stop. Furthermore, this image could also relate to the previous image of the barber and the boy as the location looks really similar. The bridge looks as if the last image has been taken place there. 

Chris States “By shooting candidly, I like the idea of creating windows into the lives of other people, but I’m most attracted to the spontaneous things that keep you guessing,” which means that he creates photography of casual things people do during the day or night and he leaves a question to his audience/ viewers of all possible things they could be doing ( the guessing game). This is done in a similar sense to my work, I done a photoshoot of my model looking at a fruit market and there is a level of mystery  because she could be stealing, picking up fruits for her grandma or she could have never eaten fruits, so she wanted to buy some.