National Geographic Photographer and Writer, Scott Lynn Riley
“Life’s too short! You have to do what you love and let go of the rest!” Oregon born photographer Scott Lynn Riley said, setting out on his endless photographic journeys through Asia, beginning in 1980. Riley’s own father became his photographic mentor, and his uncle (Chief Photographer and Director of the Army-Navy Photography Division in Japan from 1948-57) the sharpener of his style and vision. Endlessly roving across the East with his cameras from the 1980s on, Riley sought to take in the extraordinary character of the vast continent, even its most remote extremities, to photographically pierce the “whole sumptuous heart” of the East, uncovering within its essence its most marvelous, still surviving, age-old cultural traditions.
This small showing offers but a few glimpses of the iconic images Riley took in China in the 1980s, while he was completing a mainstream book series of 14 hardcover volumes for the Japanese publisher Seikaibunka-Sha and published in Japan. These volumes were devoted to the lives and works of China’s illustrious Tang Dynasty poets, the enduring works of Du Fu, Bai Ju Yi and Li Bai and many others. Written by famed Japanese scholars Inoue Yasushi and Tagawa Junzo, these volumes were done as a rich outpouring of love for the contemporary and historic culture, art and literary traditions of wonderful China.
