Most people the couple met along the way were warm and welcoming — and surprisingly spontaneous. But Ms. Fischer and Mr. Braschler did run into trouble, logging three arrests during their journey. In a place like China — here follows a travel tip from the experienced — it is best to be discreet when using a 4-by-5 camera equipped with a flash and a soft box to make a portrait of a trash collector.

“People loved it at the beginning,” Ms. Fischer said. “You have to imagine — dozens of people surrounding us while we shoot.”

But when they tried to make a portrait of a truck mechanic in Xinmin, Liaoning Province, bystanders agreed that the man was too dirty; he would give an international audience a negative impression of the country.

[…] Yet they were overwhelmed by the beauty — and the range — of the physical landscape, mountains and all. “It was just so much to digest,” Ms. Fischer said.

Twenty of the pair’s images are included in a slideshow at Lens.

In an op-ed accompanying some of her own photographs, Sim Chi Yin also described the challenges of engaging with her subjects, the rich and poor on opposite sides of China’s yawning wealth gap.

With the “rats” and “ants,” the trash collectors, cobblers and couriers, it took time to build rapport and trust. But it was even harder to get wealthy Chinese — perhaps like rich people everywhere — to open up. Most live in gated, guarded communities on the outskirts of the city, and socialize behind closed doors. A few months ago, I was granted rare permission to photograph inside an exclusive club in Beijing for high rollers, and only at a party where some members were in costume.

The migrant workers and the poor mostly accept that life is unfair, at least for now.

“There is no difference between me and the people who live in the posh condominium above,” Zhuang Qiuli, 27, a “rat tribe” pedicurist who lived in a basement apartment, told me in Beijing. “We wear the same clothes and have the same hairstyles. The only difference is we cannot see the sun. In a few years, when I have money, I will also live upstairs.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ant Tribe, inequality, photo series, photographers, photography, travel, wealth gap
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“Many children meet their parents once a year or even years, therefore some of them have both physical and psychological problems,” says the photographer.

Liu, who spent the summer at NYU as a 2012 Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow, was raised in a rural village in Shan Dong Province and is currently based in Beijing, having personally migrated to a city along with his family years prior. Beijing Railway Station, which serves as a gateway for millions of migrants to the capital, is in close proximity to his apartment, giving the photographer a unique view of the daily flood of fresh-faced migrants entering the city.

[…] After photographing family members left behind in the countryside, the photographer returned to Beijing and photographed rural migrants in their workspace. In a conceptual twist, Liu reunites family members photographically. Parents, at a construction site or sausage factory, stand beside towering portraits of their children back home, creating a visual contrast—a collision of rural and urban—and a bridging of that chasm of familial separation within a single frame.

Deborah Jian Lee and Sushma Subramanian reported on the socially corrosive effects of Chinese labor migration at Foreign Policy last year, describing its emotional toll on the country’s estimated 58 million “left behind” children. But another set of images at People’s Daily Online (via Adam Minter) presents the other side of the story, combining photographs of migrant workers with graphs of their often steeply climbing incomes.

See also Huang Qingjun’s photo series Belongings, which views China’s economic changes from a different angle, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: migrant labor, migrant workers, photographers, photography, rural areas, rural children
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Typical #Tool used by #China #Propaganda in order to #Manipulate People #Beautiful #Photos twitpic.com/aj1egy #Tibet #ChinaIllusions

— snowlions (@snowlions) December 8, 2012

At The New York Times’ Lens blog, James Estrin showcases the work of Dutch photographer Marieke ten Wolde, who has aimed to capture a more balanced view of a changing Tibet.

Like many photographers who visit Tibet, Marieke ten Wolde has thousands of photographs of beautiful mountains, picturesque villages and nomads in colorful costume. But as she immersed herself in Tibetan life, she began to shift her attention from the icons of an ancient culture to the effects of China’s rule.

“I still take those photos because some places are just so beautiful, it’s a pity not to do it,” she said. “But it’s not the most interesting part, I think.”

[…] On her last visit, Ms. ten Wolde saw a great deal of tension in the streets of Tibet’s rapidly expanding cities and said that people were vocal with their concerns about the dams, the mines and the language, which is being replaced by Mandarin in classrooms, government offices and other institutions.

“It’s gotten worse year by year since 2008, when there was a lot more freedom,” she said. “Now we can’t even go, so we don’t know how bad it is.”

Click through for a slideshow of ten Wolde’s photographs.

Images by National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita, on display at China Real Time Report, lean more towards the traditionally scenic. But this, too, is a reaction to the ferocious pace of change. In his new book ‘Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa’, Yamashita has tried to capture these sights before they are lost: “I do believe that the future is going to look a lot different than this book. It’s the last look at a Tibet that still looks like Tibet.”

See also Yamashita’s documentation of China’s high-speed rail programme, via CDT, and CDT’s latest coverage of the wave of Tibetan self-immolations which has now claimed nearly a hundred lives.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: development, landscape, photographers, photography, photos, Tibet, Tibet culture, Tibet development
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Many factories didn’t respond well to the unusual request from a foreign photographer. Mr. Schifres’s assistant would explain that the project was about daily life, sometimes invoking pride to persuade the factory owners to say yes.

But when they interviewed the workers, the photographer and his team found that the pride was really there.

“The answer was always, ‘Oh, we’re very proud; we’re happy that the products go all around the world,’ ” Mr. Schifres said. “‘This is good for China; this is good for our generation.’”

“They have absolutely no idea about controversies around the world about the Made in China products,” he added.

Click through for a slideshow of Schifres’ work, and see also Leslie Chang’s recent TED talk, ‘Meet China’s Factory Workers‘, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: factory workers, manufacturing, photographers, photography
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Huang’s project has taken him to 14 of China’s 33 provinces, giving him an unusually broad perspective of how the country is changing. He is optimistic about the process, and where it will lead.

“In lots of Chinese villages, the government has delivered roads and connected them with electricity. This has been a huge change. If you’ve a road, you can move about. If you’ve got electricity you can have TV, you get the news and ideas about what the outside world is thinking.

“The biggest problems in rural areas now are how people can get better education for their children, and healthcare,” he says.

Many photos appear to capture something that is about to be lost. Families camp as if about to move on. They are framed by houses that have just been expensively renovated or are about to be pulled down. The preponderance of cooking utensils, the paucity of clothes and items of leisure suggest a lifestyle that is about to be upended.

See also a previous CDT post on Huang’s work. His exhibit brings to mind a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009, in which Chinese artist Song Dong displayed the complete contents of his mother’s home, amassed over 50 years.

In a similar effort to document a disappearing lifestyle, journalist and photographer Howard French has published a book together with writer Qiu Xiaolong of photographs, essays and poems titled, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life. As Ian Johnson writes on the New York Review of Books blog:

We get no clichéd pictures of a beggar in front of a Louis Vuitton mural, no workers looking uncomprehendingly at a Bentley pulling into a five-star whatever. Instead we are thrust deeply into ordinary people’s lives, into their tiny living rooms with moldy walls and faded curtains. We see them living out on streets of cracked sidewalks and crumbling facades. We watch them sitting and waiting in poses of leisure. The transience and decay tells us that all this is vanishing.

See more of French’s photographs on his website.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Howard French, lifestyle, photographers, photography, poverty, quality of life, rural development, Shanghai
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In August 1966, I saw the Red Guards attack the St. Nicholas Church and Jile Temple Buddhist temple in Heilongjiang. They were burning sculptures and holy scriptures. There was fierce criticism of leaders, criticism of the monks. I started to have doubts. When I started to waver, I started to take more pictures documenting different sides of what was happening. All of us photojournalists had a saying at the time: we take two types of pictures: “useful” and “not useful” pictures. “Useful” means they could be used by newspaper. “Not useful” means they could not be used by newspaper.

By this judgment, half of the pictures in my book (“Red-Color News Soldier”) or more than that, were not useful. Those of people cheering and studying Mao’s sayings were positive. And then there are those seen as “negative.” I knew they couldn’t be published; I didn’t know when and how they’d be useful but I had a feeling they’d be useful somehow.

[…] Many people, when they saw that my Cultural Revolution pictures won big prizes, they said, “But Teacher Li, we didn’t live in Cultural Revolution, so we can’t take such great pictures.” I remember feeling the same when our teacher showed pictures he’d shot in Yan’an [the Chinese Communist revolutionary base in the 1930s and 1940s].

But this is a naïve way of looking at things. It’s not reality that creates heroes, but heroes create reality. I’m not saying I’m a hero; I always tell my students to shoot what’s around them. No need to track down disasters and wars, but just shoot what’s around them, just pick up your camera today and shoot.

Li also laments that he did not record enough of people’s everyday lives during this tumultuous period. As if heeding his advice, another Heilongjiang photographer Huang Qingjun has spent almost ten years creating portraits of Chinese people with all their belongings arrayed in front of their homes. The collections of seemingly mundane objects offer some insight into what China’s economic growth has meant for each household.

“I wanted to show ordinary people. Show them in their environment and at home, the connection,” says Mr. Huang, a tall 40-year-old from Heilongjiang Province on the border with Russia. “Because China is a place that is changing.”

The link between people and their possessions is apt, because above all, China is getting richer — though that’s perhaps not the first thing a viewer sees in the photographs, which focus on ordinary people who don’t seem to own much.

[…] Next year, the 10th anniversary of the start of his project, Mr. Huang wants to revisit families to see how things have changed.

“With annual economic growth over 8 percent, I guess a lot has changed,” he said.

Both articles include slideshows of the photographers’ work. Li’s can currently be seen at the Barbican in London, and Huang’s at the Southern Barbarian restaurant and café in Beijing. See also the work of Liu Jie, whose portraits of rural families divided by labour migration show China’s economic rise from another angle.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cultural Revolution, economic growth, Heilongjiang, history, Mao era, Mao Zedong, photographers, photography, yanan
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Taken between 1870 and 1871 by the Scottish photographer John “China” Thomson, the images reveal with often startling intimacy a cast of characters from orphans and street gamblers, to beautiful peasant girls and their high-born ladies.

[...]As well as shooting traditional, stiff-backed portraits of Manchu noblemen, Thomson plied the streets in search of scenes that would bring the exotic world of China to life for a curious public back in England.

“These pictures are fascinating because they reveal a world that most artists of that period ignored,” said Betty Yao, who has organised the exhibition that opens in Beijing next week. “Most material from this late Qing era is stuffy, formal and posed, but Thomson’s work is full of life.” [Photo from the National Library of Scotland]

From the Independent:

Edinburgh-born Thomson was a pioneer of social documentary photography, fascinated by China and South-east Asia. Such was his expertise on China that he became known as “China Thomson”. He was not the first Western photographer to document China in the 19th century, but he was the first to document the country so extensively, travelling from Formosa (Taiwan) to Fujian and along the Yangtze.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: exhibitions, John Thomson, photographers, photography
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Liu Heung Shing, a photographer with a long career in the West, has collected hard-to-find work of 88 photographers in China in a new photo book, which aims to show the sweep of ordinary life in China since 1949.

Two photos show communists on the beach: Marshal Ye Jianying, a military man in a pair of shorts, holding court over tea on a wicker table, as well as Chairman Mao himself, years earlier, sitting by the water with his family. Both photos show guarded men in unguarded moments. But there are also official communist stage extravaganzas and bloody victims of official crackdowns. China’s first millionaire can also be seen lying on his Mercedes. And naked laborers are depicted hauling a boat up a rocky river bank, with ropes, in 2005.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Liu Heung Shing, photographers, photography
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

THE cluttered beauty of this old Harbin courtyard apartment compound exists only in a photograph. The homes burnt down four years ago, along with more than 30 residents, in a story that never made it past the city’s news censors. The offending coal stove was said to be near a snow-covered wood pile in the foreground.

The compound is just one of scores that survive only in the slide boxes and digital photo files of a quietly passionate urban historian, Li Ye. For most of his adult life, Mr Li has been “preserving the history” of Harbin so his 15-year-old daughter may connect with the place they have both grown up in. [Full text]

[Image: Picturesque but impractical . . . snow covers the courtyard of one of the old apartments in the area known as the Inferno, in Harbin, by Li Ye via SMH]

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cultural preservation, Harbin, photographers, redevelopment
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In 1979, after a 15-year struggle to get a visa, photojournalist Eve Arnold took the first of her two trips to China, a journey she had long wanted to make. “From the very beginning of my becoming a photographer,” she once wrote, “high on the agenda was a plan to go to China.”

For many years, it was impossible. Red China, as it was then known, and America, the place of Arnold’s birth, were sworn enemies. But if anyone could break that deadlock, it was Eve Arnold. She’d had a distinguished career as one of the first women to join the prestigious Magnum Photos (founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others). Her trademark was to tell a great, visual story, to use her camera as an instrument for capturing lives. [Full text]

[Image via The Times]

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: foreigners in China, photographers, photography
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall