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Man Zhu
BIOGRAPHY
A fine-art photographer based in New York, Man (Jane) Zhu has received wide recognition for her work, including a book prize from the International Photography Awards, the Critical Mass 2022 Top 50 of Photolucida, and the finalist from LensCulture’s Art Photography Awards.
Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and China, and have been published in a number of art magazines. Zhu received her MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and completed her Master’s in Digital Photography at School of Visual Arts.
THE INTERVIEW
How does your understanding of memory’s impermanence inform the way you experience life and make art?
The idea that memory changes and fades over time is something I often think about, and it naturally shapes how I work. This is why I like using expired film, especially film from the years my parents and I were born. The marks of age on the negatives, the fading and distortion, feel very close to how memories slowly lose their clarity.
The three pieces I shared all come from this way of working. With the 1967 film, I photographed my own body as a way to reconnect with my mother, since she gave me life. The piece about my father uses a window as a metaphor. He has influenced how I look at the world, and the unexpected distortion on the film ends up reflecting the complicated but
steady place he has in my life. The 1994 work is more about myself; a mix of physical images and subconscious impressions. These kinds of works are what led me to think about expanding this approach into a project about aging and Alzheimer’s, since the fading quality of expired film feels close to the way memories change in real life.
What role do you think memory plays in the way we experience and connect with the world around us?
Memory is what helps us understand who we are and how we relate to other people. When memory becomes fragile, the relationships built on it also start to shift. Thinking about this made me more aware of how meaningful it can be to preserve even small traces of someone’s story.
By using film from the year someone was born, I feel the portrait carries a part of their history in a very direct way. With my parents’ portraits, the film becomes a connection across time. And in my self-portrait, the marks on the negative feel like a visual record of my own identity forming. This perspective is also important for my upcoming project about Alzheimer’s. I hope to use photography not only to make images, but to create a space where viewers can think about memory loss with more empathy.
In what ways do personal recollections and subconscious impressions influence your artistic practice?
A lot of my ideas come from small personal memories or feelings that I may not fully understand at first. Collage, layering, and the unpredictability of expired film help me express these inner thoughts in a visual way. In the three pieces for this interview: the 1967-film portrait reflects my connection with my mother, the window piece echoes how my father shaped my way of seeing, and the 1994 work lets me look at myself through fragments of memory and intuition. This way of working—using fading film, broken pieces, and layers—feels very close to how memory works for people with Alzheimer’s: sometimes clear, sometimes missing, often shifting. Because of this, I feel encouraged to continue developing my new project, hoping it can offer both artistic meaning and a gentle way of looking at memory loss.
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