Meng Chenrar had never intended to make a photobook. He was a quiet archivist in a coastal city whose mornings smelled of sea salt and cooling asphalt, and whose evenings were a slow unraveling of neon signs and the low hum of scooters. Cameras were his refuge: handheld windows that let him place order on the world, frame people and places into neat rectangles he could revisit.
They began to collaborate. Meng’s patient compositions balanced Yuchi’s spontaneous energy. On foggy rooftops, Yuchi posed with inexpensive paper lanterns; in a noodle shop, she traced the steam with quick hands while Meng captured the blurred motion of the cook. They wandered night markets, empty warehouses, and quiet libraries, building a crosshatched archive of the city’s overlooked corners. Yuchi insisted on experimenting: double exposures that nested one face within another, long exposures that stretched headlights into ribbons of color, candid portraits made between breaths. igay69 yuchi nieh photobook meng chenrar