Chinese photo exhibit appears at Loyola [CN-USA]

[Catholic_Press]

A unique set of photographs documenting the underground Catholic Church in China premieres at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Communication at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 16.

More…

 

[Dale_M]

Lu Nan apparently is a well-known and respected documentary photographer in China. He has investigated and covered numerous heart-breaking conditions.

I am not sure when the Loyola exhibit photos were taken, but here is a bit of information about a 2008 exhibit which was displayed in Houston:

The images in the series “On the Road: The Catholic Church in China 1992-1996” are grimmer. The PRC banned religion in the early 1950s, forcing people to worship underground. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Army raided the homes of Catholics and confiscated Bibles and religious objects. In one of Lu’s images, an elderly woman, a fifth-generation Catholic, clutches a large crucifix hidden by her husband during the Cultural Revolution. In another, Lu captures the spartan, dirt-floored room of a 70-year-old lay nun. It’s a portrait of her with her adopted daughter, a frail, abandoned casualty of China’s one-child policy. Anyone who has or adopts the second child of a family with one child can be fined. The nun was forced to hide the child from the authorities, who have tried to investigate.

Lu captures the haunting interior of a church that escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution because it was being used as a school. The church was returned to the area’s 200 Catholics in the 1980s, but there is no money to restore it. Its debris-filled interior remains a ruin. Catholicism definitely seems to be a makeshift affair in the PRC. One image shows people lining up on the street for confession. Confessants kneel on a stool beside the priest’s chair with a line of people behind them. I don’t think I would be confessing to much with my neighbor standing two steps behind me. There is apparently such a shortage of priests in China that some may hear as many as 1,000 confessions a day.

The photos of the Catholic community are well done, but they become stronger when you put them into context and look at Catholics as an exotic minority in a country that banned religion for 30 or so years, and in the larger context of a 5,000-year-old culture whose traditional religions included Buddhism, Taoism and seventh-century latecomer Islam.

houstonpress.com/2008-04-03/culture/fotofest-independent-documentary-photography-1985-2008/