Traffic Police Bulletin Platform

Traffic Police Bulletin Platform draws from publicly available traffic-violation bulletins issued by the transport authorities in Jining, Shandong. As part of a road-safety campaign, the platform regularly published surveillance images of electric-bike riders who were not wearing helmets.

I encountered one of these images by chance: three young women sharing a single electric bike. The scene appeared both ordinary and unexpectedly unfamiliar, leading me to examine the archive more closely. I eventually reviewed more than two hundred bulletins containing several thousand photographs, selecting over one hundred images for further editing and sequencing.

The photographs were produced by roadside surveillance cameras for a specific administrative purpose, yet their compositions and moments remain largely accidental. People talk, smile, turn around, wave, or make exaggerated gestures while riding. Some travel with friends, children, animals, or goods. Initially recorded as traffic offenders, the figures begin to reveal expressions, relationships, and bodily attitudes once the images are removed from their disciplinary context. Together, they form an unofficial portrait of everyday urban life.

The work examines the tension between regulation and vitality within administrative imagery. The platform reduces each individual to a behaviour requiring correction, while the photographs preserve far more than the offence itself: youth, intimacy, awkwardness, fatigue, humour, and the ways people move through the city together.

After a selection circulated on social media, one viewer wrote that the images first made them laugh and later made them cry. This response reflects how ordinary experience has changed. The lives depicted were once entirely familiar, yet their spontaneity and lack of self-conscious presentation now appear increasingly rare. By reorganising these public administrative images, Traffic Police Bulletin Platform considers how systems record individuals and how images can acquire emotion and narrative beyond their intended function.