He Says He Can't Talk Well or Write Well — Luckily, He Can Take Photographs | 100 People With Ideas

"You spent three years photographing the Yellow River. In an internet age that changes this fast, doesn't that make you anxious?" "Being anxious doesn't help. Good things still take time."

"I'm not good at talking, and I'm not much good at writing either, but I still have views about the world. So I use photographs to say them."

Zhang Kechun, a Sichuan native with a close-cropped head, wore an indigo shirt. We sat in chairs at the Ray Art Center in Shanghai and talked; he called himself a poor speaker.

The Ray Art Center is a Shanghai nonprofit that promotes photographic art. Its director, Shi Hantao, curated Zhang Kechun's solo show "The River's Metaphor," which recently opened at 10 Corso Como near Jing'an Temple in Shanghai.

Before Shanghai, Zhang had already held solo shows in London, Paris, Beijing, and Chengdu. The 19 photographs here come from The River Flows North (《北流活活》), the work he made along the Yellow River between 2010 and 2013. In 2014, the Korean curator Koo Bohnchang put the series forward for the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d'Arles, the most celebrated photography competition in the world, and Zhang became the first Chinese photographer to win it.

He had not expected it.

"The Arles award came as a real surprise. At the time I thought just getting to exhibit there was plenty," Zhang said. That evening he had planned to watch the World Cup semifinal in his hotel room, but decided he ought to turn up and congratulate the others, so he sat in the back row of the tiered Roman theater. When his name was read out, he ran from the back row to the stage, still wearing his backpack. "My English is poor and I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing at all... In the end Mr. Koo Bohnchang went up and said a few words for me," Zhang said.

Zhang Kechun receiving the Arles Discovery Award

Koo Bohnchang first saw Zhang's photographs at the 2012 Caochangdi PhotoSpring in Beijing — the only competition Zhang has ever entered on his own initiative. "I'm fairly passive about chasing opportunities," he said. He would rather spend the time taking pictures.

In 2009, Zhang began scouting and planning. A year later he carried a large-format camera and a tripod to Dongying, Shandong, where the Yellow River meets the sea. Before he became an independent photographer, he had drawn a salary as an interior designer in Shanghai for seven or eight years. "Those seven or eight years were late nights and staying indoors, but inside I was still in love with the idea of going out," he said.

Zhang does not deny the lyrical streak in himself. Zhang Chengzhi's novel Rivers of the North (《北方的河》) counts as one reason he set out. "It's not that the content of the book inspired me in some particular way. The main character's single-minded wish to study geology was a bit like my state of mind then. After I quit my job I had that same single-minded urge to do something."

Between 2010 and 2013, Zhang set out several dozen times, each trip lasting from twenty-odd days to a month. He carried a Linhof large-format camera, color film, and a folding bicycle, and traveled the length of the Yellow River through Shandong, Henan, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Sichuan, taking thousands of photographs. Before each trip he read up on the area and studied the terrain on Google Earth. Partly because he is introverted, he could hide behind the camera and watch coolly.

"I made a lot of plans beforehand, but once I got there I'd find it was nothing like that," Zhang told me. He was under the influence of the American photographer Alec Soth at the time, and wanted to make a set of pictures about dreams, with a little mood to them, like Soth's best-known work Sleeping by the Mississippi. But once he reached the banks of the Yellow River, he saw that China holds too much reality, too much environment, too many human conditions, and that none of it can be sidestepped.

The change was bound to disappoint him. "I often hit a state where I couldn't go on shooting. At night I'd think about stopping and going home, but at five or six the next morning I'd set out again..." Zhang smiled shyly. Unease and struggle came with the work, but there were things he didn't want to miss. In return, the time and effort he put in slowly taught him what it was he wanted to photograph.

"I think there was more happiness in it than pain, or I wouldn't have kept going," Zhang said of the Yellow River trips.

Quitting his job, becoming an independent photographer, doing something this idealistic at thirty — Zhang had luck on his side. At the start of the project, a personal connection found him a sponsor who covered all his shooting costs. Because his angle was so local, the pictures appealed naturally to foreigners with no firsthand experience of China. A few years earlier, independent publishers such as Jiazazhi and photography galleries such as Three Shadows had begun to organize and promote Chinese photographers systematically. The success of Photo Shanghai last year showed that the world photography market had turned favorable toward Chinese photographers, and Koo Bohnchang, the Korean who found him, was drawn in part by that same current.

Zhang Kechun

But making a living: Zhang raised this himself, the thing that sits opposite idealism. He had no formal training and first picked up a camera in college, and he admits he took plenty of wrong turns. When he decided to become an independent photographer, the field was far more marginal than it is now.

"I've been changing gradually the whole time. Back then I thought being able to take photographs at all would be enough." He worked part time as a press photographer for media outlets and took wedding jobs. He did reasonably well as a press photographer: in 2008, Dogs in the Earthquake, which he shot for Huaxia Geographic, was chosen as that year's international nature-category winner in the National Geographic Society's global photography competition. "The award gave me a little confidence. The weddings improved my income. Once making a living was partly solved, I could go after some things more firmly. But I wasn't going to be a press photographer for long, or shoot lucrative wedding pictures for long. I wasn't lost back then — inside I always knew what I wanted," Zhang said.

Photography is to some degree an industry steered by individual taste, and it is also thick with explanations full of citations and allusions. After the photography critics and cultural scholars had read The River Flows North (《北流活活》) their own ways, Zhang's own account of it is: "a trace of unease within the calm."

He places his work in fine art, so he doesn't deny that he goes after a sense of form. He cares about composition and has expectations set for color, though there is not much post-processing. "That kind of tone is easy enough to find in China. You just go out and shoot on an overcast day."

With no radical viewpoint, what Zhang was looking for, besides an ordinary calm along the Yellow River, may also have been a way of looking after himself. "Looking back now, this Yellow River trip did settle some questions of my own. Photographing this river at this moment meant something for the river of my own life too," he said.

He is now making another body of work covering all of China, Between Mountains and Water (《山水之间》), in which he appears in every picture and asks local people to press the shutter. "We are inside the environment of the present. We are onlookers and participants at once, outside it and within it."

Before the interview ended, I asked him four questions. Q: Were you working especially hard while you photographed the Yellow River? Z: Ordinarily hard, I'd say. When there's work to do, you do it. Q: Is your love of photography really that strong? Z: At the very least, I still don't know what else I could do. Q: Whom do you admire most? Z: Andreas Gursky — not because his photographs sell for the highest prices in the world, but because he took the thing to a new level, which is impressive. And Thierry Henry of Arsenal. My biggest hobby is football; when I was shooting in Lanzhou I even bought a pair of boots so I could play. Q: You spent three years photographing the Yellow River. In an internet age that changes this fast, doesn't that make you anxious? Z: Being anxious doesn't help. Good things still take time.

For more photographs, visit: http://zhangkechun.com/

Cover image from Image China, Zhang Kechun, and the Ray Art Center