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Pig photo collection to hit stores

"Contrary to popular perception, pigs are clean, smart, affectionate and are very good friends to humans."

Lee Han-long, photographer and section chief at the Animal Technology Institute of Taiwan

There is the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, or horse ? But to Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (FRPS) Lee Han-long (黎漢龍), pigs may be the fairest of them all.

His latest photographic collection, Dancing with Pigs, which contains more than 200 photographs of pigs that were selected from his collection of more than 20,000, will hit the stores just before the Year of the Pig ends.

As section chief of the Pig Performance Test Station at the Animal Technology Institute of Taiwan's (ATIT) animal resources division, Lee knows all about pigs, having worked with them for more than three decades.

Growing up in the countryside in the 1950s, Lee tended pigs for his mother.

He has already exhibited his work on various occasions over the past few years, he said.

"My passion for photography started in 1979, when I started working for ATIT. I was trying to kill time, started reading photography books and taking pictures of the pigs that surrounded me," he said.

Lee's first piece of photography was taken when he was a sophomore in high school, when he took a black-and-white picture of one of the pigs his family owned, he said.

The piece is included in Dancing with Pigs and is titled Wrinkles on Mother's Face, he said, adding that the picture documented the hard work and perseverance of his mother.

"Pigs are an inseparable part of Taiwanese lives. When I was little, keeping pigs was the way we earned our living," said Lee, a Hakka. "But at the time I never expected it to continue being true as I started working myself."

Asked what motivated him to publish his album, the pig fanatic said: "I wish to present to society a side of pigs that people don't normally see."

The album documents pigs with "various expressions" -- happy, angry, sad and ecstatic -- and under various circumstances, from nursing piglets to scientists producing genetically-engineered piglets, Lee said.

"Contrary to popular perception, pigs are clean, smart, affectionate and are very good friends to humans," he said.
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