CM: In your panoramas, you play with multiple focal points and depth of field, thereby directing the attention of the viewer much like a film director. How did this photographic device evolve for you? What do you think it communicates? What do you hope the viewer experiences? AS: There are lots and lots. I would like to do a story about the relationship between the body and food. I’d also like to re-do all the advertising photos that exist and make them resemble works by Rembrandt for example, to ridicule them. I don’t know which idea will emerge yet. Anna Sansom (AS): Your work often relates to human rights. Has each of your projects always related to shedding light on a specific situation? Beneath his lens, the women are freed from the gaze by which they are usually seen—sexual objects to be used and discarded. His images dig deeper into who they are. When possible, he has heard their stories; he has given them the dignity that most people crave—to be heard. It has been an obsessive pursuit, one that has led me to experience the ever greater discomfort brought about by the forces that serve to cultivate creativity in conformation to the machinery of art. Years of creative experimentation have shown art to be a rare element with its origins outside of my own thought, an element to be found, to be recognized, an absolute only to be marveled at. The process that guides this effort to bring this purity through to the surface has been one of relinquishing control, an attempt to bypass one's preferences, a means to make known that which we do not already know. What issues forth is a cleansed art. It resists absorption into what we have come to know as the "art world," a superficial construct shaped by market consciousness in which we act as consumers/producers in service of its appetite out of control. I look for this new found clarity that it may serve as an aspirant in rekindling within others, the experience of art's infinite nature, one unfettered by these corrupting forces.

After this they would go on to share a dynamic career together, showing their work in galleries and museums across the world, with a solo show at this year's Rencontres d' Arles Photography Festival that featured selections from the Liulitun works, and the grand opening of their ambitious 1200 square meter Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing's flourishing new Caochangdi art district this July. I've always wondered how the medium of photography, the medium which cannot avoid its reference to the real, may be used in metaphysical purposes, as for example Victorian photographers did to represented ghosts. The answered lies deep in the history of photography, at its very first steps in Rijlander's and Robinson's representations of allegories which were manipulated in a darkroom. These images were surreal before there was a Surrealist movement in photography. They describe the non-existing, the fictional world of literature. Similarly, Hammam uses complicated methods to revise the original photo. Images are recorded and processed either by film manipulation or via the generative tool of a computer programme. They are taken away, stolen from reality. So, they are paradoxically illustrative, but not representational at the same time. These images form an oasis in which no political message or social drama is hidden, and it is at this place that photography is shifting from the given banality of the real into a more mystic and allegoric representation of the non-given and untold. Hammam is fully embracing the paradox of a medium that isn't capable of recording the unknown. Striving for ego-less art is language not often heard in this century, where high profile, market-driven artists fight to see who can be the loudest amongst the shouters. This self-consciousness has been leading the viewer into an inbred funnel vision of narrower and narrower meaning; artist's obsessive attention to style and trend is now producing art about art about art. But ego-less photography is not the point here. It is simply to avoid this artistic pretension to which we are becoming so accustomed to, for it is in reciprocity to the degree of Truth in art. HS: The main character in your work has often been described as lonely or isolated, but it seems that viewers connect to the situations your “everyman” is experiencing, so that your work is more about shared humanity than isolation. Do you agree? Or do you feel that isolation is at the core of human experience?SL: I did fashion photography, I did advertising… I tried to earn a living, and was not always successful! I had a studio at 156 5th Avenue for a number of years. And I worked for different people and for magazines. Some of my favourite pictures I did with Soames for Nova, which is an English magazine that I liked a lot. And the Art Director of Harper's Bazaar saw my pictures for Nova and said to me: “Why don't you do something like that for us?” So I gave her an idea a few weeks later and she had forgotten what she had told me and she said: “We can't do that! We're Harper's Bazaar!” and that was it! Sometimes I made some money. Sometimes I was very impractical. I bought prints, I bought certain things. I love the works of Bonnard and Vuillard and owned some. I also had a little collection of Japanese prints. I think that the Japanese explored many ideas long before Western artists ever did. Christ is my life,” he wrote. “I photograph the living and the dead. My work is a prayer. Photographing makes me the possessor of sanctified and secret wisdom. And for that, I will be judged, not by man—but by God.”

I see Liulitun now through inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life. home. They had come to Vrindavan of their own accord, wishing to spend the last years of their lives in devotion to Krishna.two haunting series Moksha and Ladli. Both are an indictment of India’s patriarchal society. Moksha is about outcast widows who have found refuge in the holy city of Vrindavan, where they live in ashrams and worship the god Krishna in temples. Their dream is to reach Moksha – or “heaven” – to be liberated from the painful cycle of death and rebirth. Each portrait is This collision between sight and touch where suggestions of the haptic were bound into the concept of a process (the etched line that the finger traces on the plate), stimulated Soltau to work more three-dimensionally. She wanted her ‘drawing’ to be felt by the person, for the body to become central to the action, to physically ‘feel’ the thread. accompanied by a first-person testimonial, explaining how the women found themselves in their current situation.