below A traditional wedding
costume from Fes, Morocco,
where marriage celebrations
can last up to a week
(The Essential Veil, 2010)below RiGht Diana’s
series of photos explore
the symbolic meanings
that the veil possesses
in different cultures (The
Essential Veil, 2010)When I first met Diana Lui, she held my gaze – deep, warm and
mysterious, with the same soul and intensity with which she gazes
upon her subjects and then photographs them, mostly women,
using an old view camera which she found in a Pasadena flea market
decades ago, and which has since become her camera of choice.
“This camera is like my house,” she says,
referring to her camera obscura, which is
the size of a coffee-table book and comes
with an enormous black velvet cloth.have to set it up in a person’s home and it helps me to
centre myself.”
Identifying herself as a Franco-Belgian
photographer of Chinese origin from Malaysia, Diana
certainly knows what she’s talking about when it comes
to rooting down.
Having uprooted from her hometown in Kuala
Lumpur at the age of 14, to continue high school in LosGROWing roots
Diana picked up the film camera during her days at the
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)’s College
of Design, where she studied for her Major in Fine Arts.
The vintage view camera was made in the early 20th
century by the classic Gundlach-Manhattan Optical
Company in Rochester, New York.
“It’s a huge piece of object and it helps me to root
down,” she says. “It is like a pillar to me, because I