My subject is Ziqi Lin, a 24-year-old student preparing for her postgraduate exams. She lives alone in Chengdu with her cat, her medication and her dietary supplements.
She was at her heaviest when she weighed 65kg and, after a year of weight loss, she weighed 46kg. But she was still not satisfied and continued to lose weight, until she reached the unhealthy level of 37.5kg.
Ziqi suffered from depression and anxiety about her future. When she found some sense of achievement by controlling her diet, this behavior and gradually this desire for control developed into an eating disorder.
Ziqi knows she needs to eat more than one meal a day, but when she forces herself to eat more, she gets stomach pains. These discomforts, reinforce her restrictive eating behavior, causing her digestive system to go on further strike, and so she continues on a vicious cycle.
Eating disorders are an overlooked problem in China. According to Our World in Data, by 2019, approximately 5.1 million people in China will suffer from an eating disorder and the country has the highest number of deaths from eating disorders in the world.
Janet Treasure, a professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, has published a report in The Lancet calling for more attention to be paid to eating disorders. She argues people with eating disorders tend to be sensitive, more anxious, and have a shared sense of identity and low self-confidence but are more demanding of themselves.
I chose to shoot Ziqi in black and white to highlight her depressed and helpless feelings. The time she spent suffering from anorexia was a bleak period. Her family and friends did not understand her and few things in her life made her happy – even eating was a burden.
Portraitist Ima Mfon has said that a person’s true nature is best expressed in black and white. He believes that colour can sometimes be too descriptive and detract from the meaning of the subject.
The black and white photos of Ziqi prevent colour from distracting the audience and are my way of focusing attention on the inner struggle associated with eating disorders.
When Ziqi is shopping in the supermarket or arranging flowers, the colours of the flowers and supermarket goods are rich, creating a soft and warm atmosphere, but even at those times, Ziqi is lonely inside.
The black and white photos express her emotions and inner struggles. The photograph that, for me, captures this sense of loneliness most profoundly is the picture of her in silhouette on the balcony.