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"In the Southern part of China lies a themed park called The Dwarf Empire (or The Kingdom of the Little People) where about 70 Chinese people affected with dwarfism live and work. They make show of living in mushroom-shaped houses (though, in fact, behind the park is a custom-made lodge\u00A0to accommodate their height), of having an emperor and their own ministers and, twice a day, they gather on an artificial hill to perform. In order to be hired by The Dwarf Empire you need to be shorter than 1.30 m (4.3 ft) and be willing to pose in pictures with tourists (mostly Chinese) who come to enjoy the show (and, at times, for the sake of a picture, they don\u2019t hesitate to tug at or even lift up the little people of the park). The park was set up by Chen Mingjing, a wealthy real estate developer who, he said, wished to give his little fellow countrymen the opportunity to live and express themselves freely, away from discrimination and surrounded by people who, being in the same position, would truly understand. The Dwarf Empire is also the title of the graduation project of Sanne de Wilde, a Flemish photographer who, especially through this work, has catalyzed international attention and recently has been nominated one of the 30 most exciting photographers by the prestigious British Journal of Photography. Her project on The Dwarf Empire is complex and layered, constantly on the edge between real, surreal and fiction, the personal lives of the inhabitants and their performance constantly blurring, overlapping so that, seeing the photographs and videos of a wedding \u2013 a real one, explains Sanne \u2013 there is nothing that indicates that we are not still watching bits of the show. Sanne presents this bizarre charity theme park through a sort of &amp;quot;visual puzzle&amp;quot; without providing answers: her photographs are like question marks that worm their way into the viewer\u2019s head forcing him to get information and to strive to understand: is it some sort of &amp;quot;commercialization&amp;quot; of individuals concealed behind a pretend charity intent? Is it a &amp;quot;freak show&amp;quot;? And are the little people happy to live there? How do they feel? And how do we feel looking at them? Looking at the photographs in which Sanne \u2013 tall, blonde and blue-eyed \u2013 becomes part of the mise-en-sc\u00E8ne (given that, in the context, she was the &amp;quot;deviation from the norm&amp;quot;) and finds herself posing with the tourists and the theme park inhabitants, we start wondering who is looking at whom. We chatted to Sanne de Wilde about her latest project, how she started as a photographer, about the responsibility of portraying other people\u2019s lives and how we are all prisoners of the mask we wear, with the difference that some masks are easier to wear than others. Read the interview. You studied painting in Antwerp for one year before switching to photography: what made you change your mind? I really liked painting and the feeling that with drawing you can create your own reality from scratch: in photography you have to start from something that&amp;#039;s already there - even if you compose a photo-collage and create something out of your own imagination, the core material is reality, bits of existing things. This to me is at once the strength and the weakness of photography: painting is a lonely art, it is much harder to see the world and experience other people&amp;#039;s reality when you paint - you are physically stuck to your canvas. Photography for me is a way of experiencing things, a way of living: it allows me to get involved in situations that I would have never experienced otherwise, and challenges me to try and understand them - and translate them into images. Do you tend to build images or you shoot instinctively? I definitely\u00A0am an instinctive photographer. I am not at all technical nor calculating, what&amp;#039;s really important to me is the story - and being swept away by it. I think photography as a medium already defines you. You are not stuck to a canvas but you are stuck to a frame, and there&amp;#039;s only so much you can actually push it to really make it your own. I like it to not be in complete control over the situation, be surprised by the people I am meeting and let them interact with my work. I love the fact that you can incorporate all this personal relationships and life experiences in a photograph and that the final image can be influenced by the subject itself. Your images have a strong intimate quality to them. I was actually quite struck by the fact that it took only a little more than 2 weeks to shoot The Dwarf Empire. How do you deal with your subjects? For me it&amp;#039;s very interesting that a lot of photographers work in a total opposite way of me: they create beautiful, stunning, intense portraits without connecting with the person they are photographing at all - they actually choose to build a wall and focus only on the image. Which works, because people will let you look inside of them even if you don&amp;#039;t connect with them. I personally wouldn&amp;#039;t feel good in building this wall, taking everything and then just leave. I always try to give something in return, even if it&amp;#039;s just sharing an instant. Sometime this can actually make your photo worst: you get lost in the moment, and you don&amp;#039;t want to destroy that by taking out your camera. But in the long run I prefer being a good person with a human way of working rather than taking everything from everyone and walk away. And maybe, by not forcing things and let things be, by starting with something that is not orchestrated or thought before, I can manage to keep the purity and candor of the situations I&amp;#039;m photographing. Let\u2019s talk about The Dwarf Empire. Why did you decide to do it? I discovered the existence of this place in China when I found online a photo of people posing with individuals affected by dwarfism - I immediately thought &amp;quot;Ok I need to go there.&amp;quot; It started as a study of the commercialization of what presented itself as a charity business and on how people deal with diversity in different cultures but there are actually many other layers to it. It&amp;#039;s also about the man who set it up, about the people who visit it; it&amp;#039;s about us and how we want to see too, but we just don&amp;#039;t admit it the way Chinese people do: we like to put a screen in between. What kind of response would you like from the viewers? I didn&amp;#039;t want to force a message on viewers: I wanted to plant a little seed in their head and let it grow, without pointing a finger and going &amp;quot;Look at your daily voyeurism, all this reality TV you are watching is exactly the same: it&amp;#039;s a human zoo and you enjoy it every day. When you see someone that looks different, you stare at him but you don&amp;#039;t deal with him.&amp;quot; For me it&amp;#039;s paramount to show the story from many different perspectives; I don&amp;#039;t want to hand over any answer but I\u2019m hoping to raise questions in people and let them derive their own information and message from the images, go out there and deal with those who are socially labelled as &amp;quot;different&amp;quot; in their own way. That&amp;#039;s the only way to treat someone fairly: you have to meet him and engage with him. Sometimes an image is just an image, but sometimes you can make people connect with what&amp;#039;s behind the image \u2013 and when you get personally involved, everything changes: you stop seeing the image only and get to see the person. In the book dummy you made of The Dwarf Empire, you included also the letter they wrote you and the pictures they took of you.\u00A0 That really gives the whole project an unexpected twist. Can you tell us about this choice? When I was there I discovered pretty quickly that I couldn&amp;#039;t be the &amp;quot;invisible photographer&amp;quot; who walked around there and shot without being seen, because as soon as I had entered people started taking photos of me: I was the Western blonde woman stereotype. But I thought it was a natural interaction: I was taking photos of them so why wouldn\u2019t they take photos of me? It was simply fair and honest. Also, since they couldn&amp;#039;t really speak English and I couldn&amp;#039;t speak Chinese, it became like a visual language: we didn&amp;#039;t have words so we communicated through images. What&amp;#039;s the idea behind your Snow White project? The project started when I visited a school for blind children for a documentary I was making. There, I met a boy affected with albinism for the first time and I was astonished: he was the physical embodiment of a type of beauty that was at the same time vulnerable, fragile but also unearthly and powerful. In my portraits of people with albinism, they become almost transparent; the light passes through their skin making them look as if they have become one with it. And since they are so sensitive to light - it&amp;#039;s almost their enemy - I felt that capturing their image through light itself was a really powerful symbol. The British Journal of Photography wrote that you focus on the visual outskirts of society. Do you agree? They always say that, but for me it&amp;#039;s not exactly true. The subjects I portrayed both in The Dwarf Empire and in Snow White are symbols of stereotypes that people have had in their head for centuries and can&amp;#039;t get rid of. To me, they are strong visual representations of being prisoner of your own image and body - and how painful that can be. All of us are - I&amp;#039;m also stuck in my own physical appearance, I am also wearing a mask; it just seems like my mask is much easier to wear. Sanne De Wilde (1987) graduated with the book The Dwarf Empire from the KASK art academy in Ghent in 2012. The photo series won the Photo Academy Award 2012 in the Volkskrant Magazine and De Morgen categories, as well as the International Photography Award Emergentes DST 2013. De Wilde started working as a photographer for de Volkskrant this year."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.vogue.it/en/photography/emerging-photographers/2014/03/21/sanne-de-wilde/>