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Ye Chuan

December 10, 2024

Twenty days at Erhai, and no postcard views

For twenty days in Dali I went down to the lake every morning, and hardly took any of the pictures everyone else takes.

Two figures standing in shallow water on the lake at dawn

In my first two days in Dali I shot a lot of “standard” Erhai: sunsets, gulls, clouds. When I got home and looked, they were no different from anyone else’s.

From the third day I changed my approach: go to the same spot every day and photograph only the water.

Erhai under an overcast sky, cloud hanging low, a line of mountains in the distance
Overcast: the lake and the sky are nearly the same grey.

After a while I began to see how different the water was each day. Sometimes it looked like frosted glass, sometimes there was a thin line of wind across it, sometimes the far mountains seemed to float on it. The people standing in it just gave those changes a scale.

Later I deleted all the standard pictures. What’s left is the series you see now.

Setting yourself a very narrow rule is easier than giving yourself a huge place to shoot.