Fine art of the snapshot

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Photo journalist Mimi Sun recently opened an exhibition of photos she took over two years with lomo cameras. Photos provided to China Daily



An odd array of framed photographs hangs randomly from the walls of Cafe Corridor. Some images are indistinct, in others the colours are so heavily saturated as to dazzle the eyes. They are undistinguished snapshots in terms of framing, lighting composition, nor, seemingly by the eye of the professional photographer, yet they are reflections of a trend in photography that's caught on in Hong Kong and they are considered art.

The photographic style is lomography and the photographer is a professional. Her name is Mimi Sun.

"They don't surprise you at a first glance, but when you take a closer look, you will be amazed at the colors or the lighting or the focus of the images that are somewhat different from the pictures taken by a conventional digital camera," said Sun, a 24-year-old photo journalist at Terence Pang Photography.

Most of the pictures in her exhibition, at the ground-floor cafe restaurant opposite Times Square, were taken over two years while Sun traveled around the world. She used eight models of lomo camera. Street signs in Poland, old temples in Beijing, sunset on Taiwan beaches, all have become still moments in her camera.

The exhibition named "Lomo", sponsored by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, features the works of Sun and her partner, photographer Molly Zheng.

The pictures are taken by a special kind of analogue camera, which often records over-saturated colors, blurred focus and over-exposed lighting. These effects, normally "frowned upon by conventional photography lovers who use digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras", in Mimi Sun's words. "We call it the 'lomo' style," said the girl from Harbin, a northeastern city on the Chinese mainland.

The "lomo" style derives from "Lomography", an international camera company headquartered in Austria. Lomography restores old analogue cameras, bringing them back to life as tools for a "new style of artistic experimental photography comprising unorthodox snapshots", as the company says on its website. The name Lomography was inspired by the former state-run optics manufacturer LOMOPLC of Saint Petersburg, Russia, the company that created and produced the 35 mm LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera. It was a fixed lens, leaf shutter, zone focus, compact camera. The Austrian founders of Lomography signed an exclusive distribution agreement with LOMO PLC in 1991. The camera product became the centerpiece of Lomography's marketing and sales ever since. LC-A, along with other models produced by the company, are referred to as "lomo" cameras by fans. Lomography itself has also come into use as the term that defines this style of photography.

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