JAMES ZHENG'S PHOTOGRAPHY

 

Born and raised in Fuzhou, a city in Southern China, James Zheng has always been drawn to the arts.

 

Curiously enough, getting involved in photography came about during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China. While political struggles disrupted everyone's lives, Zheng was hired as an assistant in the photography department of a local medical school. "It was there that my real training in photography began," he says. While working in the lab, he had a chance to learn about different photographic materials and equipment, the basics of picture taking and lighting.

 

It was also during this bitter period in Chinese history that Zheng realized his love for the great outdoors. After his apprenticeship at the medical school, he, like millions of other youth, was sent to remote regions to be "re-educated" through manual labor. While planting crops, cutting trees, and cultivating bamboo in the mountainside, he also began to discover the beauty of the natural world around us.

 

In 1981 he came to the U.S. to join the rest of his immediate family-- from whom he had been separated since birth. At Santa Monica College, he specialized in photography, with the help and encouragement of the program chairman Larry Jones. Through camping trips, Zheng began to discover the monumental landscape of the American West.

 

After finishing his studies at Santa Monica College, he got a job at Colortek, a custom color lab which he has worked for 21 years.

 

In pursuing his personal photography, Zheng soon realized he needed a larger negative to capture the details he wanted-- 35 mm and 120 mm frames were not large enough. At first he constructed his own 5x7 camera out of wooden frames and custom-pleated bellows. Later he picked up a second-hand large-format Wollensak camera body and paired it with a German-made Schneider lens. These days he also owns a field camera, continuing to use 5x7 Fujichrome transparencies to capture the color depth and sharpness that he wants in his photographs. He prints the enlargements himself, then has them sent out for a thick protective coating of clear lacquer. He believes this process helps give the finished products a dramatic, three-dimensional effect. "It's like opening a window to the outside," he says, "with light coming in from behind."

 

To find suitable subjects, Zheng takes trips to places which are sometimes old haunts, sometimes new discoveries. "When I'm traveling, I use both my photographic skills and my artistic eye to frame the picture, to calculate the lighting."

 

Nowadays, Zheng spends many weekends exhibiting his work in art shows, where he has also earned acclaim. Throughout the year, he has won many awards for his photography, including but not limited to first place in the Beverly Hills Art Show, Hermosa Beach Art Show, Conejo Valley Art Festival, Rancho Palos Verdes Art Festival, and the Studio City Art Festival.

 

As the world enters an age of digital photography, Zheng keeps to custom photography and printing due to an inherent love for natural beauty. "I believe digital and custom photography should be two completely separate categories," he says, "because custom photography captures what nature has made, and digitally processed photography shows the work of people". Zheng often ventures out into the wild to find the perfect lighting, composition, and beauty in the last bits of nature untouched by man, and seeks to capture this through his work. All this plus his method of printing on alluring metallic paper and laminating it with clear lacquer resonates with significance because through all this, he has created his own original masterpieces.  Zheng is a person who deeply enjoys natural beauty and captures it his own way in hopes that others, too, can enjoy it as well.

Sincerely yours,

-James

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