Today, I watched a film called terminal bar, it talks about the stories happened in a bar in New York City from 1972 to 1982. The film is not dynamic as usual, but is made up by numerous black-and-white film photographs. The fact is that I’m a big fan of film cameras, in my mind, film photographs are the best tool to record one’s memory. The black-and-white background makes everything much more period-style.

The movie mentions that some consumers in terminal bar are black men, and some of them are gay men, who are usually not the ‘big guys’ in history, the photographer used the camera to record their lives, memory and the other kind of history of a city in a extremely documentary style. For me, I’m not into those magnificent, splendid scenes, on the contrary, I prefer things or stories about subculture, especially the subculture of teenagers.

What impressed me the most was that in that loads of pictures, few people deliberately look to the lens, more pictures are about the real expressions and actions, and as I mentioned, this realistic feeling is the most attractive thing for me.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are a lot of character facial features in terminal bar, and the distinct stories behind those different face. With a great interest in realistic photography, I wanted to make a series of work like this as well.

Liu Xinyi