Lu Guang

In September 2019, Lu's wife Xu Xiaoli published on Twitter that Lu had been home for a few months.

Lu is based in New York City, the first Chinese photographer to be invited by the U.S. State Department as a visiting scholar, and Beijing. In early November 2018, whilst travelling in Xinjiang, he was taken away by state security agents. He was released in 2019.

In early November 2018, whilst travelling in Xinjiang, Lu was taken away by state security agents and has not been heard from since. A restrictive security regime with re-education camps for the predominantly Muslim ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs is in place in the region. Amnesty International is concerned Lu's detention may relate to this situation in the region and has called on the Chinese government to "release him immediately", and Human Rights Watch has called on it to "immediately confirm and clarify" his "whereabouts and well-being".

In 1980, Lu encountered photography while working in a silk factory in Yongkang. From 1987 until 1993, he ran his own photo studio. Later, he studied photography at the Fine Arts Academy of Tsinghua University (Beijing) from 1993 to 1995. He worked for several years on advertising assignments before going freelance as a reportage photographer. During his years of study at Tsinghua University, Lu encountered Xie Hairong, another Chinese photographer, from whom he gained inspiration to become a photojournalist.

Lu was born in 1961 in the city of Yongkang in the Zhejiang province of China. He grew up under Mao Zedong's policies in the People's Republic of China. At the age of fifteen, following Mao's death, China underwent economic change with the introduction of Western industrialization.