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Chinese photographer Lu Guang at the 2017 edition of Visa pour l'image. RFI / Screen Capture
Where is Lu Guang, internationally renowned photographer? For three weeks, we have no news of this Chinese who lives in the United States. He disappeared during a trip to Xinjiang, a region where Beijing is waging a merciless campaign against the Muslim minority of the Uyghurs, a target of over-surveillance and arbitrary detentions. Today, the photographer's wife is sounding the alarm.
With our correspondent in Beijing , Heike Schmidt
Threatened, censored and sometimes beaten for his disturbing clichés, Chinese photographer Lu Guang was traveling to Xinjiang province when he disappeared. In a letter posted on Twitter, his wife said he tried to contact the local police on numerous occasions, to no avail. According to her contacts on the spot, her husband was arrested for reasons that are unknown.
The photographer, three-time winner of the prestigious "World Press Photo" award, has traveled China since the 1990s to draw the authorities' attention to the ecological disaster. Lu Guang's mission was to show the hidden face of growth at all costs: dead fish floating on polluted rivers, pedestrians wrapped in a toxic cloud or miners with blackened faces.
" I am convinced of being on the good side of humanity against industrialists who continue to defraud without being worried, " said the famous photographer last year at France 3 on the sidelines of his exhibition "Development and Environment" shown at the Visa festival for the image in Perpignan.