Xu Xiaoli, Lu Guang’s wife, says the photographer is missing and that she has not been able to contact him since November 3.
Update: Photographer LuGuang’s family has recently received notification from the public security in Kashgar that Lu has been formally arrested but there is no written document and he can’t meet his lawyer & family. No further information for the moment.
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Lu Guang, 卢广, born 1961, is a Chinese independent photographer and the narrator of the miseries of the Chinese people through his photographic reports of the great impact that told the desperate lives of China’s dispossessed.
His works consist of projects on social and environmental issues exposing the lives of “people on the margins of Chinese society: coal miners, drug addicts, HIV patients.”
Lu Guang was traveling in the western region on November 3 when his wife, Xu Xiaoli, lost all contact with him. He met some photographers in Urumqi, the capital of the region, a week before, and was supposed to meet a friend on November 5 in Sichuan.
A friend of his wife contacted the authorities who replied that the photographer along with a colleague was detained by security officers who would take him back to his home region of Zhejiang.
For years, the Chinese security apparatus in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, with a Muslim majority, has strengthened to combat “terrorist threats”. In a telephone interview, wife Xu said that this was Lu Guang’s first visit to the region.
Lu Guang’s career has been characterized by particular attention to the last and the dispossessed.
Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International (read here our interview with Patrick Poon), said Lu’s detention may relate to this situation in the region and he told us: “We believe that the only logical reason that he went missing while he’s in Xinjiang is that the Chinese authorities are afraid that Lu Guang might have taken some pictures about the real situation in Xinjiang. There’s no other reason why he would suddenly vanish. The Chinese authorities have no right to deprive him of meeting a lawyer of his own choice and communicating with his family. We urge the Chinese government to disclose his whereabouts and ensure that he’s not subjected to torture or other ill-treatment if he’s in detention.”Below you can see some galleries that made Lu Guang about the conditions of a village where most of the inhabitants were infected with AIDS after selling their blood to survive, and another gallery on pollution in China. Article updated from its original version
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