Alan Taylor’s In Focus, a regular photo blog on The Atlantic’s website, put China in its frame for an edition earlier this week. By compiling a collection of powerful images caught by photojournalists over the past few weeks, Taylor provides us a glimpse into the diverse and captivating political and cultural landscape that makes up China. The images selected juxtapose an assortment of scenes from across the nation, showing beauty and inequity, the traditional and the trendy, the prosperous and the displaced, and more of the contradictions that make up modern China. From Taylor’s intro:
China, the most populous country and the second-largest economy in the world, is a vast, dynamic nation that continues to grow and evolve in the 21st century. In this, the latest entry in a semi-regular series on China, we find images of tremendous variety, including astronauts, nomadic herders, replica European villages, pole dancers, RV enthusiasts, traditional farmers, and inventors. This collection is only a small view of the people and places in China over the past several weeks
The subjects of the 47 pictures included visually supplement much recent CDT coverage of China: Liu Ying – China’s first female astronaut; Wang Jinxiang – mother of activist Chen Guangcheng, caught in the fallout of his recent escape; a Uyghur man in the ruins of his recently demolished house; victims of China’s increasingly endemic obesity problem; a scene from inside China’s clone of an Austrian world heritage site; a young Tibetan monk mourning a protester who died in self-immolation; a Hong Kong street brimming with protest after Li Wangyang’s suspicious suicide; and much more.
For more photo-documentation of a changing China, also see In Focus’s previous China slideshows: Tiananmen Square, Then and Now; A Look Inside China; Rising Protests in China; or 21st Century China.
