Soldier Crab of Photography
                                                                                                                                  Gu Zhenqing

  Soldier crab, a crustacean of the order Decapoda, in a shape midway between shrimp and crab, is categorized as arthropod of anomura. In order to seek asylum and protect itself, soldier crabs make a living in empty shells or hollow objects. To them, living in shells of others’ could be referred to as humble living in pigeonholes and could even be endowed with an attitude of seclusion.

  Soldier crab’s life habit makes it a tenant who pays no rent. This great reputation comes from its arbitrary look, with big claws waving around clamoring for swallowing the meat of mollusks and occupying the shells to themselves. Actually, soldier crab is merely an environment-friendly resource recovery worker who lives in the empty shells abandoned by dead Mollusks. Shells are good-quality “economical housing” inherent to shellfish and after their death, the shells become relics. When soldier crabs found the empty shells, they would simply tidy them up and make good use of these wastes, turning them into their inseparable home to be carried wherever they go. 

  Soldier crab is a symbol and when referred to photography, it delivers a message of analogue.

  Photography used to be one abandoned shell for scientists and inventors after the Industrial Revolution. However, it was found by some early photographers and artists who came live in these shells just like what soldier crabs do. These people have actually boosted up a burgeoning new art form of photography in virtue of a new technology. Cameras and photography, although not inherent to human beings, once encountered, becomes an inseparable spiritual home to many.

  To many contemporary artists, photography is considered as rent-free housing. It was out of enterprise that they choose photography as the art medium but not out of seeking self-protection. Once artists move in this pigeonhole, they are blessed with a tool to sharpen their insight and to broaden their imagination and at the same time, they get for themselves a shield, a shield that defends the rights of breaking through and surpassing the boundary of art. Some people go in and go out with ease while some go in but never get out. Photography is merely a shell, but it is capable of changing one’s life style. An inclusive shell it actually is, which breeds private emotions of artists as well as their subjective thinking. Once chose photography as the art medium, artists have to play by its rule. Their emotions and thinking will be more or less labeled by the images and symbols that appear on photos. By doing this, artists could be entitled photographers, and from then on they put on their shoulders a tough solid shell that is constituted by cameras, techniques and many professional procedures of making a photo which in all, made the shell not that easy to carry.

  To stop time and to fix space became one way of approaching the essence of on-the-spot photography. However, when this chosen art medium really gets into the value system of artists and becomes their tool of reaching out for the ideal, the concept of photography turns for real to be the shell or rather home for artists. Photography, being a domain invaded by artists and possessed by their extreme life style, does it still have other possible way of presentation?

  The new generation of shutterbugs nowadays is no doubt the diluted presence of artist and photographer. Camera to them is like cell phone to most of us, which is carried wherever they go whatever they do. Whenever the interest is aroused, they would simply pull out the camera and click. The came of the age of graphical information and the floods of images we see everyday everywhere are partly due to the socially cultural activity of these shutterbugs who enjoy exposing their works over all social media and arousing public interest. To see and to be seen blindly, this collective unconsciousness hidden in the camera and photography reflects certain deep-rooted human nature.

  The image produced by the medium of photography has long been sheltered in the shell of mechanic duplication and image perfection technology which could easily perpetrate visual cheating. Photography constitutes an artificial world that exists in parallel with reality and reality subject. Sometimes when reality goes by and reality subject dies away, the image stays along and becomes the elements that call up and sculpt old times.