My fingers lingered over the fabric cover as I pulled the book out of a pile. On the cover, the eyes of a family in an old black-and-white family photo peered out, superimposed on top of a modern color image of the same photo studio. Flipping through the pages I realized that this is much more than a book of random family scrapbook images. This is a deliberate re-construction of one immigrant’s personal history — and a meditation on the interplay of photography, time, distance, and memory.
The text begins: “One winter’s day in 2001, I was helping my mother clean her house. I busied myself with the dusting and vacuuming, working my way through the house. By the time I got to her bedroom, I found my mother going through her belongings: family snapshots, letters, an assortment of pocket-sized calendars, old diaries, scraps of paper with dates and notes written on them. It occurred to me that although she and my father lived in a reasonably sized house, she had very few material things. Apart from half a wardrobe of clothes and shoes, it seemed that most of her treasures could fit in a biscuit tin. With so few belongings, I wondered if perhaps the things most important to her were stored inside her head?”
And so began the artist’s journey: Dinu Li and his mother, side by side, piecing together recollections and places of the past with their present day realities. Like paging through their family album, we are drawn into his mother’s life story as they retrace her steps from China to Hong Kong to England.
The story opens like a film. A flight over the snowy mountaintops of China. Fade into a woman gazing out a window. Gauzy curtains fall over his mother like a thin veil of dust in the rooms of her past. With time, would we even recognize the places of our past? Would we choose to keep the memory, distorted over time, of these places, or would we risk going back to question everything we think we know? Where is the truth? In the photo or in the memory? Has the photograph become our memory and the stories of our lives become built around the pages of our family photo albums?
A mix of present and past, Dinu Li combines family photos, his mother’s recollections, and images of the places they revisit as they actually are now. Weathered old family photos, reproduced in their original sizes, juxtaposed against the super-saturated colors of the rooms of her past, decayed with time, keep the reader in a limbo somewhere between then and now. The recent photos tell a story of China’s changing landscape over time. Just as our memory shifts so does the land around us. We have the images and the anecdotal details to imagine what her life must have been like. And we also see the life that continued in those places after she had left.
Li succeeds in recapturing the intimate story of his mother’s life as she migrated from China to England, which is at the same time part of his own story. He is a first-generation Chinese-English man rediscovering, perhaps even creating, his past, through the snapshots and oral history of his mother. He tells a universal story of a daughter, a wife, and a mother, as seen through the eyes of her son. A rare story of Chinese heritage that will leave you with more questions than answers — and perhaps encourage you to blow the dust off the pages of your own family album.
— Colleen Leonard
The Mother of All Journeys
by Dinu Li
Hardback, clothbound with insert
96 pages, 62 color photographs
280mm x 225mm
Dewi Lewis Publishing 2007
ISBN: 978-1-904587-41-5
Book reviewThe Mother of All JourneysPhotographer Dinu Li re-traces the steps of his mother’s life travels from China to Hong Kong to England. This family history is told through a deft mixture of old family photos, oral history, and new photos of the places that were significant in her past, but shown as they are today.View Images
Book review
The Mother of All Journeys
Photographer Dinu Li re-traces the steps of his mother’s life travels from China to Hong Kong to England. This family history is told through a deft mixture of old family photos, oral history, and new photos of the places that were significant in her past, but shown as they are today.
The Mother of All Journeys
Photographer Dinu Li re-traces the steps of his mother’s life travels from China to Hong Kong to England. This family history is told through a deft mixture of old family photos, oral history, and new photos of the places that were significant in her past, but shown as they are today.
Trending this Week

A Suitcase of Negatives
The discovery of an abandoned archive reveals an extraordinary document of everyday life in Georgia under Soviet rule, prompting photographer Guram Tsibakhashvili to seek out the mysterious identity of its creator.

Announcing the 2021 LensCulture Art Photography Award Winners!
Announcing the winners of the 2021 Art Photography Awards! Discover the 41 remarkable photographers who have been selected for their vision, innovation and creativity.

The Americans
This is the photo book that redefined what a photo book could be — personal, poetic, real. First published in 1959, Robert Frank’s masterpiece still holds up — the selection of photos, and their sequence and pacing is fresh, rich, generous, and...

LatinAmericana
Founder of Native Agency, Laura Beltrán Villamizar, takes a look at a celebration of Latin American photography at PHmuseum, which offers a chance to discover an eclectic assortment of artists disrupting clichés of the region.

101 Pictures
Dipping into an archive comprising over 30 years of work, many of these 101 photographs pay tribute to Tom Wood’s mastery of color street photography and his love of humanity in and around Liverpool and Merseyside.

26 Black-and-White Photography Favorites from LensCulture
LensCulture’s editors revisit 26 of the most popular recent articles that feature black-and-white photography – portfolios, essays, interviews, exhibitions and book reviews.