Lu Guang's Photos of Pollution and AIDS in China, and His Detention

Originally published 2018-12-09.

Lu Guang is a Chinese independent photojournalist known for documenting the hidden costs of China's rapid growth: polluted rivers and air, dangerous industrial work, and the villages in Henan province where poor farmers caught HIV after selling their blood. His work has won three World Press Photo awards and the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and it has been published by National Geographic, The Guardian and Greenpeace.

In November 2018 Lu became the subject of the news himself. While travelling in the Xinjiang region, he was taken away by state security agents, and for weeks his wife could get no information about where he was. He was released in 2019 and now lives in New York. This gallery brings together a selection of his photographs, with context for each one, along with what is known about his detention. The images are documentary and some are distressing, showing illness, poverty and death; they are presented as the photographer intended, as a record of real lives.

Who Lu Guang is

Lu was born in 1961 in Yongkang, in Zhejiang province, and first picked up a camera in 1980 while working in a silk factory. He ran a photo studio, studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Tsinghua University in Beijing in the mid-1990s and worked in advertising before turning to reportage. Inspired by the photographer Xie Hailong, he chose to spend years on single subjects, returning again and again to the same places.

Lu at work among labourers breaking rock in thick white dust. Much of his career was spent in places like this, where workers handle lime, coal or chemicals with little protection. Being there, rather than shooting from a distance, is what gives his pictures their closeness.

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A portrait of Lu Guang shared by his wife, Xu Xiaoli, when she appealed publicly for news of him in late November 2018. She set up a Twitter account specifically to raise the alarm. Her posts were the first sign to the outside world that he had disappeared.

His major awards include first prize in World Press Photo's Contemporary Issues category in 2004, a third prize in Spot News in 2011, and a third prize in Long-Term Projects in 2015 for Development and Pollution in China. He also received the Henri Nannen Prize in 2008, the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in 2009, a National Geographic grant in 2010 and a Prince Claus Award in 2013.

His detention in Xinjiang in 2018

In late October 2018 Lu flew to Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, at the invitation of a local contact to take part in photography events. He was then due to travel on to Sichuan to meet a friend for a charity project, but never arrived. His wife last heard from him on 3 November. When she contacted the wife of his host in Xinjiang, she was told that both men had been taken away by state security. Officers in Lu's home province of Zhejiang later confirmed the detention to the family, though no formal notice was given to her.

Xinjiang was at the time under some of the heaviest surveillance and policing in the world, as Chinese authorities carried out a campaign aimed at the Uyghur Muslim population that they described as countering extremism. Journalists reporting in the region faced close monitoring. Lu had once said in an interview that in China you never know whether you are in trouble, because the rules are not written down.

Press freedom groups responded quickly. Reporters Without Borders called on Beijing to reveal where he was and to guarantee journalists' safety and freedom of movement, including in Xinjiang. Amnesty International urged China to release him immediately, and Human Rights Watch asked officials to confirm his whereabouts and well-being.

A post from 27 November 2018 by the Twitter user Patrick Wong reporting that Weibo, China's main microblogging platform, had removed a trending tag about the missing photographer. Removing topics from trending lists is a common way for Chinese platforms to limit discussion of sensitive news. The screenshot shows how quickly the story was being suppressed at home even as it spread abroad.

Industry, pollution and the people who live with it

Lu's long-term project on pollution followed factories, mines and chemical plants across northern and central China, including along the Yellow, Yangtze and Qiantang rivers. Rather than photographing smokestacks alone, he focused on the workers and neighbours who breathe and drink what those plants release.

A worker in Wuhai, an industrial city in Inner Mongolia, photographed on 10 April 2005. His face is coated in soot from the coking ovens behind him. Wuhai grew up around coal, and Lu returned to it repeatedly to show what heavy industry does to the people who work in it.

A woman, hood pulled up, stands in front of a row of chimneys pouring out smoke and dust. In the original caption from this series, Lu describes coal and lime trucks throwing up dust that harms nearby residents. The framing places a single person directly in the path of the pollution.

A hand coated in thick black sludge held over a grey harbour full of fishing boats. Lu often used one close detail to stand for a whole place. Here the contaminated water that fishing families depend on is made literally tangible.

Two monks seen in silhouette against a skyline of factory chimneys. According to Lu's caption, they belong to Laseng Temple, a monastery more than two centuries old that was also a centre for studying traditional Mongolian medicine. Pollution from the surrounding factories became so bad that few pilgrims still visit.

Workers wrapped in masks and scarves walk through a cloud of white dust. Lu's caption links scenes like this to the relocation of factories from China's wealthier east to its central and western regions, where rules were often looser. Moving industry inland spread growth, but also spread its hazards.

A pipe pours processing waste into a tailings pond at the Baotou Steel complex in Inner Mongolia, one of China's largest steelmakers. Baotou is also a major centre for processing rare earth metals, and its tailings ponds have long been a concern for nearby farmland and groundwater. The circular pattern of the waste makes the image almost abstract until you understand what it shows.

A man covers his mouth and nose beside a discoloured river. The gesture is one many of Lu's subjects repeat: an instinctive attempt to keep out a smell or dust they cannot escape. The river in the background shows the kind of industrial discharge he documented along several of China's waterways.

Waste water spills from a pipe onto the shore and into the sea at the chemical industrial park of Yanwei Port, in the coastal city of Lianyungang, Jiangsu province. The foam and crusted residue spread across the tidal flats toward the open water. Coastal chemical parks like this one expanded quickly in the 2000s.

A shirtless worker in a face mask in a grimy factory setting. Lu's caption places this series in Xintang, a town in Guangdong known as a global centre of denim production, where workers prepare abrasive stones used to give jeans a worn look. Denim finishing and dyeing have been linked to heavy water pollution in the area.

Green pasture pocked with deep craters, with cattle walking between them. Damage like this is typical of ground collapse over old mines, a problem in several coal regions of northern China. Seen from above, the landscape shows how extraction underground can reshape farmland on the surface.

Children growing up near the factories

Some of Lu's most affecting photographs show children, because they live with pollution and poverty they had no part in creating. These images also come from his work on rural health, where illness and disability often go untreated for lack of money.

An 11-year-old girl, named in Lu's caption as Xu Li, is bathed in a metal basin by a relative. According to the caption she had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Lu photographed many families in so-called "cancer villages", places with unusually high cancer rates near polluting industry, although proving a direct cause in any single case is difficult.

A close portrait of a young boy whose face is smudged with coal dust. Children live in the same industrial districts where their parents work, and play in the same air. The image recalls that China's rise to become the world's second-largest economy came with a heavy environmental bill.

Children with disabilities sit on a mat while an adult walks among them. Lu's caption says they were orphans taken in and cared for by local farmers out of charity. In rural areas with little state support, such informal care was often all that was available.

Children with cerebral palsy eat powdered milk straight from the surface of a bed. The image is hard to look at, but it documents the reality of care with almost no resources. Lu's work on such homes aimed to draw help and attention, not pity.

The AIDS villages of Henan

Lu's 2004 World Press Photo prize was for his story on the HIV epidemic among blood sellers in Henan province. In the 1990s, poor farmers were paid to give blood plasma at collection stations that pooled blood and reinjected red cells, a method that spread HIV quickly. In some villages, according to the World Press Photo caption, up to 40 percent of inhabitants were HIV-positive, and many could not afford a test. Local officials long played down the scale of the crisis.

A boy kneels beside a grave mound where two framed portraits have been placed, with incense burning in front of them. The scene is one of the many funerals Lu witnessed in Henan, where AIDS left large numbers of children without one or both parents. The portraits give the dead a face in a story that officials preferred to keep anonymous.

A grandmother cries out as she holds her severely ill grandson in her arms. Lu's caption describes her as pleading with the sky for his pain to stop. In families hit by HIV, grandparents often became the last carers left.

A woman leans over her husband, who is gravely ill and close to death. In Henan, couples frequently became infected together after selling blood, and one partner nursed the other with no access to treatment. Free antiretroviral treatment only began to be rolled out in China from around 2003, too late for many.

Qi Guihua, wasted by illness, is held by her husband. According to Lu's caption, she fell ill after coming home to her village from Beijing for the Spring Festival, and died two hours after this photograph was taken. It is one of the most widely published images from the series.

A sick man lies on a bare bed while a family member stands nearby in an almost empty room. Lu noted that families like this sold nearly everything of value to pay for medical care. The decorations still on the wall hint at the household it used to be.

A young girl warms her chapped hands against her face in winter. Her father, according to the caption, was living with HIV while still supporting five children and his elderly parents. Lu's close framing keeps attention on the child rather than the disease.

Two girls kneel in a dark room as their family prepares to bury their six-year-old brother, who died of AIDS. Children were often infected by their mothers at birth. Scenes like this made the Henan series one of the strongest records of a public health disaster that was officially underreported for years.

Release, and why his work matters

Chinese police confirmed his arrest in December 2018 but did not publicly explain it. In September 2019 Xu Xiaoli wrote on Twitter that her husband had been home for a few months. Voice of America, as reported by Australian Photography, said he was believed to be on a bail-like residential release under surveillance, and a family friend warned he could still face charges. Lu, who had lived partly in the United States since the 1990s, is now based in New York City.

His photographs remain some of the most important visual records of the human cost of China's industrial boom and of the Henan blood-selling scandal. They are worth viewing with the dates and places that go with them: they document particular people at particular moments, many of them in the 2000s, and conditions in some places have changed since. What they show, above all, is that environmental and health crises are lived by individuals, and that someone has to be there to record them.

Sources: Photography by Lu Guang (World Press Photo, 2004 Contemporary Issues); Wikipedia, Lu Guang (photographer); Australian Photography, Chinese photographer Lu Guang released from detention (2019); contemporary reporting by BBC News (November 2018). Gallery first compiled by Bored Panda.