Open lens captures multiethnic culture

Photojournalist Livia Monami made friends all over Guizhou province. Photo provided to China Daily

Photo Beijing 2014 kicked off

Centurial photos from France reveal old China

While trailing the migration of nomads from Central Asia, photographer Livia Monami lands in China's Guizhou province to find its multiethnic culture sweeping her. Mike Peters reports.

Her camera has captured villagers who live the centuries-old lifestyle of hunter-gatherers in the shadow of modern banks, traditional opera scenes in which ancestral ghosts appear as human figures that dispel evil and bring auspicious influence, and Shamans telling fortunes in a muddy Guizhou street.

Livia Monami, 50, wasn't supposed to be a photographer or wander through rural Southwest China, embracing the traditions of Guizhou's residents, as she recently did for six weeks.

"I was in university to study biology - dolphins, whales, Jacques Cousteau, all that," says the Italian freelance photojournalist. Toward the end of her studies, she organized a two-week "vacation" to work with Brazilian researchers who were studying freshwater dolphins in the Amazonia region.

But it was the indigenous Pataxo Indians in the Bahia area, and the "vast empty spaces with people living in their old ways" that really stuck with her, she recalls. "I was there only 15 days but I knew my direction."

That direction impelled her to places far from the modern hustle and bustle, to communities where life has changed little over centuries, staying attuned to nature.

A return trip to Amazonia taught her to shape that quest for common human values into a livelihood.