China: The Past is a Foreign Country

My grandparents fled the People’s Republic of China and entered the Republic of China in 1949. I was left with them after my birth in 1979 when my parents entered the US. Memories from then are faint and perhaps uneventful, except a slight sense of desire for my mother. I went to elementary school in the US but was brought back to Taiwan for high school and I struggled to fit in. Dropping out of college, I fled from Taiwan in 1999 and moved to New York City, without a friend, and forever an orphan of childhood love I’d never experienced.

Recurring nightmare since then: feeling the sky folding downward, slowly and steadily, over my self, drones within my skull, my jaws tight, body stiff and hammered down. At age five, I met my mother and she watched over me to ensure that my afternoon nap was taken. My back towards her and I pretended to be dead.

I oscillate in between the here and the elsewhere of my imaginary, sketching forth a landscape ruins in reverse, a melancholy before the melancholic journey arises, dissipating before the completion of dreams, preemptive dreams striking upon the memory of the future. I’m a stranger to myself with an address that changes without end, drifting from one town to the next, following footfalls into transit stops and transitory playgrounds and onto a dystopic drawing board of sorts.

I can’t fully digest the details of the world, breathing its smoke and smog, and all the petty whispers and pretty lies circulating in my lungs, engulfing what’s left of me, and in no act can the gnawing space between us be relieved.

Photographing is like catching mosquitoes buzzing ceaselessly in one’s dark room.

The negative images projected in the dark room are my silent quarrels with the world, and imperfect and precarious as they may be, I scratch the smallest speckles of light against the dissolving surfaces of fogged and out-dated photographic paper, anticipating the blacks of my desire to reverse, like moths with the lights out.

The lone hit man in exits the room, turns back to glance, the caged bird is still alive.

Walking into the quake aftermath and searching through the artifacts that remain with the living, my presence felt though not affecting quantitatively the conditions I saw. We exist in the menagerie as we know, and that is enough, the flood of chance, the ritualistic fire, the afternoon shade, and we move on, in miniature alterations, to each our disquietude.

Our man in Chengdu drives us anywhere we want, almost running over a cop only to yell “out of the way” or something in local Sichuanese, and driving on, here to honk is a normal gesture saying that “I’m here.” One night into an hour driving on quake ridden mountain roads (daytime its beautiful despite the damaged cars and voided railings over steep drops, but night changes all…) cutting pass cars, quite tense even for our driver, especially since it was all silent, the horn died along the way… What was that 50s French film with Yves Montand driving through the night transporting nitroglycerine tanks cautiously on uneven roads and one fatal bump would ignite all?

We sneak through under a covered rickshaw, to see the site of a collapsed school with the memorials of dead children, was it nine or ten thousand that died? There were parents mourning (I saw) and protesting (I saw not). Soon a cop takes us out, jotted down our passport numbers, and escorted us away.

There is always a side path into the towns left half intact, debris everywhere and the white powder covering grounds where corpses once laid.

Headed back down the mountain roads, stopped in a village, became center of attention, everyone hospitable and highly alert, reminded me somehow of the ancient tale by Tao Yuanming, then an informer of the village informs of our arrival. We’re scooted off again as foreign crazies with cameras, passed through another village, another checkpoint.

A family living in a ramshackle, the 6 year-old girl curiously modeling for me, I’m offered chicken and corn wine, the best meal I’ve had in days.

I walk bravely, into the cops, chatted a bit, waited for orders, gave them 2 films (I’d shot 10-15 rolls), got them back, promising not to publish negative views of China back home to them foreigners, that’s that, no use bribing cops with cigarettes but I feel semi-pro now dealing with them. The flooded areas caused by massive landslides I couldn’t reach, too many checkpoints, one would take days to find alternate footpaths.

I arrive weeks after the Sichuan quake: the dead had been buried or burnt en masse, so I see only the living, in the tennis court that is a temporary hospital and makeshift shelters dotting the periphery alongside the fallen boulders.

In this dirt world but not of this dirt world, we seem to exist: constant washing and rewashing of towels to wipe off the summer sweat, the summer dirt, and the winter dirt.

One may consider Chongqing if one may choose to die, exit the cable car over the Yangtze river, gulping her ancient thick silt, away past boatmen with curious eyes. This vertigo city, built upon mountains and endless stairs and in between the footpaths, dropping us into our nights, traversing from house to pavements spackled with blackened spit to ground drillings for yet another modern tower to foot massage parlors (the girls inside watching television) filled with grilled chickens and tossed away bones, fusing below what is called one’s head, and high above, vapors from the river spirals forth towards an unknown future that neon KTV lights disguise as intoxication.

The flooded town sees itself in the dirt roads leading to the river swallowing all, and on boats, livestock wait desperately to be slaughtered and scale upon the signs of futures index. Memoirs of an overdevelopment, it is 2008 and I arrive too late, the new city towers visibly above the opaque ruins that one calls history, slanted and crooked along a deep slope, the local officials installing a grand staircase and cable car lines linking the living and the dead.

Another snapshot besides the Gezhouba Dam: a forgotten pool, the dam affirms and negates the passage of time, as kids swim and bathe without care, and not far away, a carcass of a dog floats, alongside the weeds and reeds in this moist summer afternoon.

Private bus conductors drag you on regardless if the destination of yours and theirs coincide or not. Then they dispose you off the highway and drive on.

Chinese ideograms embody an image of the past with all the layered references, in the (misty) air, so to speak, in newspapers and propaganda banners, and hence the material evidence of history is discarded without sentiment lost.

The LCD screen above grounds our experience with flickering lights and sweating bodies chanting: “Let’s go China!” The wind brings forth ashes from fireworks afar, showing not what the cries were for. I’m in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping plaza, minutes from Tiananmen, invisible amongst the crowds awaiting the 2008 Olympic open ceremony.

After the applause, the master feeds on time their sheltered, and in frenzy, digestion is made, to ensure precise vomit of the self.

And heard faintly the murmur of someone with a flat mechanical tone.

I once walked past a zoo, surrounded by road constructions while visitor numbers zero. The loneliest zoo in the world, I imagine. The one-humped camel came to entice me, but shy I was and declined. Monkeys were fed, so were the wolves. The male lion roared, but who heard? Soon the earth will swallow him too.

Cicadas molt, their shells remain empty on tree barks for us to ponder.

Wayne Liu

Eric Guo, whose real name in Guo Yang, is a young man who came to Beijing from the countryside with the dream of becoming a photographer. I know this because we have corresponded through email with the use of Gogle translator, an amazing web page that translates, more or less, English to Chinesa and vice versa. Guo has photographed the Yi people, an indigenous, ethnic minority that live in the mountains of Sichuan province, using a 2 1/4 camera, and traditional film. Guo has a beautiful sense of black and white, and his images seem to come from another century. His lament, that traditional cultures are being absorbed into “modern life,” is familiar, and its also the reason that photographers often seek out that which is endangered and disappearing, before they fade away into history. Above all the camera provides a record.

Rian Dundon is an American photojournalist from Monterey, California. He is currently enrolled in the Social Documentation M.A. program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds a B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from New York University (2003). Since 2005 Rian has lived and worked predominantly in Mainland China. He speaks Mandarin Chinese and is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States.

Rian’s work has been featured in TIME, Newsweek, The Irish Times Magazine, Stern, Vision, and Out Magazine. He has exhibited in solo and group shows at the FotoGrafia Festival (Rome), Beijing Photo Spring, The Camera Club of New York, The New York Photo Festival, New York University, and the Angkor Photography Festival. In 2007 Rian received a Tierney Fellowship for his project examining youth culture in interior China. He is a contributor at New America Media and has lectured on his work at New York University and East China Normal University in Shanghai.
http://www.riandundon.com

M Scott Brauer was born 1982, Landstuhl, Germany, to American parents, and is currently based in the American Northwest. Brauer graduated with honors from the University of Washington with dual degrees in philosophy and Russian literature and language in 2005 and worked for daily newspapers in 2006 and 2007: the Northwest Herald in suburban Chicago, and the Flint Journal in Flint, Michigan. Brauer is represented by Invision Images, Aurora Select, On Asia, and Wonderful Machine and his clients include: The New York Times, Fader magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Time Asia. http://www.mscottbrauer.com

Katharina Hesse holds a graduate degree in Chinese ( & Japanese) studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris; she is one of a few foreign photographers who are accredited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has lived in China for 17 years.
Hesse initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002. In 2003 and 2004 she covered China for Getty. Hesse is self-taught in photography and her photos have appeared in publications such as Courrier International, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, EYEmazing, Glamour ( Germany),IO Donna ,Le Monde, Marie-Claire,Neon, Newsweek, Reporters without Borders annual book ( Germany),Stern, Vanity Fair (Italy/Germany),Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit etc. http://www.katharinahesse.com

Markel Redondo is a freelance photographer based in Bilbao, Spain. Some of his clients include Greenpeace, Bloomberg, the British Council, Le Figaro Magazine, Le Point, New York Times, South China Morning Post, The Mail on Sunday or Frommer’s Travel Guides. Markel was finalist at “Descubrimientos” Photo Espana 2007, nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2007, 2009 and 2010 and took the prestigious Eddie Adams Workshop in 2007. After spending two years documenting social issues in China, he is based in Bilbao now, where he works on commisions and projects. http://www.markelredondo.com

Carolyn Drake was born in California, USA in 1971. She studied history and media/culture at Brown University, graduating in 1994, and later learned photography at ICP and Ohio University. Her photo career began at the age of 30, when she decided to leave her multimedia job in New York to learn about the world through personal experience. She currently lives in Istanbul and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, a World Press Photo award, the Lange Taylor Prize, and a Santa Fe prize finalist. http://www.carolyndrake.com

Wayne Liu currently resides and eats in Chinatown, NYC, and was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1979.

Ryan Pyle was born in 1978 in Toronto, Canada and in 2002 realized a life-long dream and moved to China, where he began taking freelance photo assignments, working for the NY Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and others. http://www.ryanpyle.com

Sergio Ramazzatti has written and photographed hundreds of stories for most of the leading Italian magazines, including D La Repubblica, IoDonna, supplement of the daily Corriere della Sera, Specchio,
supplement of the daily La Stampa, Ventiquattro, supplement of the daily Il Sole-24 Ore. As a novelist, he published ‘Vado verso il capo’ (Feltrinelli 1996), ‘Carne verde’ (Feltrinelli 1999), ‘La birra
di Shaoshan’ (Feltrinelli 2002), ‘Liberi di morire’ (Piemme 2003), ‘Tre ore all’alba’ (DeAgostini 2005) and ‘Afrozapping’ (Feltrinelli 2006). In 2005 he won the Enzo Baldoni Prize for Journalism of
the Province of Milano, and the International Photography Award (Los Angeles) in the ‘Editorial’ category.
www.parallelozero.com

Xiqi Yuwang, was born in 1975, in Zheijang, China. He arrived in Spain in 1990, where he first studied Fashion Design, and afterwards Photography, at Art and Design HighSchool of Valencia. Yuwang grew up at PineHill, in a familiar ambient, among poets and painters. His work will be exhibited in ARCO, the most important Contemporary Art Fair in Spain this year. http://xiqiyuwang.blogspot.com

Guo Yang (Eric Guo) graduated in 2002 from Tsinghua University in Fine Arts, and photographs elements of the past that are being absorbed into so-called modern civilization in China. Guo was born in a poor, mountainous region in Northern China and at aged 18 entered the Hebei Arts and Crafts School. Contact Eric Guo at ericguo06@yahoo.cn .

Holly Wilmeth spent her childhood living between the city and jungles and agricultural plains of Central America. After graduating in Political Science and Languages, she lived in Japan for
two years teaching English in rural communities. In 2003 she returned to the US where she took up photography as a career, but her wanderlust continues to see her visit many remote corners of the world from Mongolia to Mexico, where she is currently based. http://www.hollywilmeth.com

Christian Als is a Danish photographer born in the countryside outside Copenhagen. Most of his work centers on ‘concerned photography’ and he is drawn to social, political and economic issues throughout the world. Als has worked in countries like Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, DR Congo and Kenya. I love to undertake social and humanitarian projects around the world, and his work has been published in publications such as TIME, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times Magazine, GEO, Stern, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal and L’espresso, to name a few. http://www.christianals.com

James Whitlow Delano’s work in Afghanistan was awarded 1st place in the 2008 NPPA Best of Photojournalism competition for Best Picture Story (large markets). He received the Alfred Eisenstaedt (Eisie) Award administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and presented by Life Magazine, for work done in China. His photographs have also received the Award of Excellence three times from Communication Arts Photography Annual for work done in China, West Africa and monograph book publishing. James has been cited with awards in the PDN Photography Annual five times. Delano’s 2003 Three Gorges and 2004 Shenzhen, China projects have been cited with Picture of the Year International awards. He lives in Tokyo. http://www.jameswhitlowdelano.com

100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community.

1. Great issue, thanks for sharing.

   Gilian Woolsey — April 11, 2010

2. Thank, I appreciate the feedback!

   Andy — April 11, 2010

3. Brilliant issue!

   Doug Starne — April 27, 2010

4. Finding a such blog as your blog is a happy thing.

   sandra — April 28, 2010

5. J’aime beaucoup la représentation de toutes ces facettes de la dépendance. Merci ! ;)

   Thierry MARCHISIO — May 9, 2010

6. cool web site u have by the way

   Daisey Burreson — February 24, 2011

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   “Здравствуйте, вот ЭТО страна-Матушка русских!”, как бы говорит инозрителям куратор выставки Mother Russia | Фотолюбитель — February 6, 2011

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1. This is an outstanding exhibition! Very engrossing! Thank you, Andy, for putting this together.

   Cheryl Hanna-Truscott — June 11, 2010

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4. This is really information great documentation of subject matter, engaging images and text. Well done

   Tenee Attoh — October 23, 2010

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The American Dream

Like many American myths, the American Dream was created by a cabal of propagandists.

Hollywood studios, automobile manufacturers, the media of post-war America, and a booming housing industry, among others, all stood to benefit from an unprecedented marketing opportunity in the form of hundreds of thousands of GIs returning from World War II. And so it was born, the American Dream, a house to own, a car in every driveway, two children, and an unlimited future of consumption. Like its sister myth, the Cold War, the American Dream, the words carry such weight that they are captitalized.

This issue of 100Eyes is about words, and the way that images can change our perception of them. Most artists and photographers explore emotional territory. Suffering and joy are as much a commidity as are facts. In the work of the photographers represented in this issue of 100Eyes, we see reflections on the American Dream, on what Americans aspire to be, and on how their aspirations, formulated by the visions of Hollywood, are often transmuted in ways that are not anticipated and that often make us uncomfortable. In Brenda Ann Kenneally’s Upstate Girls and in Daryl Peveto’s American Nomads, we see what some might think are grotesque parodies of “the American Dream.” But to the photographers, and their subjects, this is anything but the case.

In a world of Madoffs what are the outcasts, those less able to survive?

Likewise, in the photographs of Caleb Cole,
who dresses up in second hand clothes and photographs himself in elaborate recreations of the lives of their sometimes imaginary owners, there is both pathos and the narcissism of fantasy, of escapism that has always been part of the dream.

Photographs, of course, sometimes do not speak for themselves, and often the headlines, captions, and artistic statements that proport to elucidate are nothing more than sideshow mirrors themselves, shifting in appearance as images are projected over them.
Such is the case with the American Dream, words which have a entirely different meaning than when filtered by Mustafah Abdulaziz’s hopeful images of the Obama inauguration images, than when viewing Daryl Peveto’s essay, “American Nomads.”

Andy Levin
New Orleans

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Children of the Black Dust.
©Shehzad Noorani

Introduction

I discovered Bangladeshi photography in an unusual way. Like many people I spend too much time on Facebook, the social networking internet site that everyone seems addicted to. I have collected a large number of Facebook friends, many of them photographers from all over the world. Some I know and some I don’t After a few weeks on Facebook I started to get strange messages at the bottom of the screen popping up as live conversations, from photographers who wanted to talk. Some could barely type a word of English. They were awkward moments. I didn’t know what to say. It turned out that many of these little blips on my Facebook radar were from Bangladesh. This got me curious–there seemed to be quite a few photographers from Bangladesh. Checking the search engine Google for searches using the key words “photo magazine” by geographic location showed that the leading source of the searches were coming from Bangladesh. Amazing.

This issue of 100eyes shows a country as seen through the eyes of its own photographers. There is nothing remarkable about that, except in this case the country is one of the poorest nations in the world, known for being a subject for photojournalism rather than as a provider of photojournalists. Photographers flew into Bangadesh from New York, Paris, or London, that is, when they weren’t headed for nearby India. Photographers will still be flying to Bangladesh, including myself hopefully, but we won’t be alone.

In 1989 Bangladesh was depicted for Western eyes in a famous essay by photographer Sebastio Salgado that presented the shipbreaking yards at Chittagong. Twenty years later Bangladeshis are now behind the camera, and the results are stunning. One of the featured essays this month is “Breaking Ships, Broken Men,” an essay by Saiful Huq Omi that looks at the same shipbreaking yards that Salgado photographed. Instead of reducing the workers to so many ants on a giant steel ant hill, Huq addresses the horrific conditions that the men work and live under–while retaining the atmospherics that made Salgado’s work so compelling twenty years before. It’s fabulous work.

If there is a message in the emergence of “indigenous photographers” it is that these photographers are able to achieve an intimacy with their subjects which enhances their humanity rather than objectifying and reducing the disadvantaged to stereotypical images of suffering. We are all too familiar with the pictures that accompany the campaigns of organizations responsible for feeding those who can not feed themselves. This imagery strips the impoverished of identity and renders the third world in one dimension– poor, and the result is more often than not that the poor stay that way.

As economically challenged as Bangladesh may be, there are 200 newspapers in the small country, and many of them are staffed by students from Pathshala, a school founded by Shahidul Alam, the central figure in the emergence of photography in Bangladesh, and the author of the cover image of this issue of 100Eyes. Alam developed into a photographer in Britain in the 1980’s after receiving a Doctorate in chemistry, and in 1989 started the Drik Picture Library and Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, the latter taking advantage of a World Press Photo initiative. Most of the photographers showing work in this issue of 100Eyes went to Pathshala or taught there.

A traditional sanskrit world for “center of learning,” Pathshala, according to Alam, is
far more than teaching photography. “Pathshala is about using the language of images to bring about social change,” he writes. “It is about nurturing minds and encouraging critical thinking. It is about responsible citizenship. In a land where textual literacy is low, it is about reaching out where words have failed. In a society where sleek advertising images construct our sense of values, studying at Pathshala is about challenging cultures of dominance.”

Alam and his fellow teachers, along with the World Press folks including Robert Pledge of Contact Press, have done a fantastic job. The students are exposed to classic photojournalism, poring over old issues of Life and National Geographic. Having spent hours going through the Drik archives I can testify to the training of the photographers– they always look for the single image that tells the whole story. I wondered to myself how there could be so many fortuitously placed buildings in Bangladesh, as the Drik photographers seem able to find a high vantage point for every breaking news story. Abir Abdullah’s coverage of a horrific high-rise fire in Dhaka, is as if he is almost one of the rescuers himself. Tanvir Ahmed is a very gifted photographer who seems able to move from news to features, and from color to black and white effortlessly. What can you say about
Mumen Wasif? At 27 he is already working at the level of a Magnum photographer.

I can’t say enough about all these photographers– they deserve attention and employment outside the confines of Bangladesh. Inside Bangladesh the photographs carry the importance that Life Magazine stories had. And in a country where literacy is so low, as Shahidul Alam points out, “what better way than pictures” of gaining understanding?

Looking at Bangladesh through the haze of the Internet makes me nostalgic for the time when photojournalism mattered, when people opened their weekly copies of Life or Time Magazine and looked to photographers to show them what was happening in their country and the world. At that time it seemed as though photography could really make a difference– and that time was not that long ago. I was one of those photographers.

I get a similar sense when I look at the work of the Pathshala photographers– that their work is not just for the vacuum of the Internet, meant only for other photograhers to admire, or rendered “modern’ and fit only for curation and the gallery wall. Far from it, their work has relevance and a purpose within their own country, which may be underdeveloped in some ways, but seems progressive in others.

There are huge problems ahead for Bangladesh. Overpopulation, an enormous burden of poverty in mouths that the country itself can not feed, energy dependence, and the ravages of the monsoons combined with the floodwaters from the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, all these problems are facing a country with limited ability to develop on its own, But one thing is for certain– whatever happens in Bangladesh will be well photographed

–Andy Levin/New Orleans. Louisiana

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   চলচ্চিত্রে দৃশ্যমাত্রিক দ্যোতনা সৃজন – ১ | শব্দনীড় — January 26, 2011

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Dorothea Lange’s photograph of Florence Thompson and her children made in 1936 may be the most famous photograph ever taken. Known simply as the “Migrant Mother” the photograph was made during a month long assignment traveling through migrant camps in California, photographing for Roy Stryker and the Resettlement Agency.

What is not as well is that Lange and Stryker argued over how to distribute her pictures. Lange wanted to offer her work to Life Magazine directly, while Stryker wanted to give the magazine images taken from all over the nation by agency photographers. Ultimately both Lange and Stryker gave Life sets of images, and in the end the magazine used only one image taken by Lange, not the image that later came to be known as “migrant mother,” but a more defiant picture of a farmer that was given a positive spin, calling him a “new pioneer.” Even that photograph was not credited to Lange, but to the Farm Security Administration, and she lamented later that what she had documented was a “condition” and that Life Magazine was interested in news. The image had appeared in local papers all over the country and as is the case with many iconic images eventually became ingrained in the public’s memory.

In Rodrigo Cruz’s image of a Honduran transient riding the Mexican trains to the US I see a bit of Dorothea Lange. Not just in the uneasy look away, but in Cruz’ concern for the plight of a man that he has no connection to, aside from his compassion for another human being. And just as no one at Life wanted to see Dorothea’s documentation of the suffering of displaced people, few want to learn more about people called “illegal immigrants,” men and women who have been displaced from their homes by a need to sustain themselves and their families, an idea that is not that far from the life of Florence Thompson.

In much of the world men and women remain economic refugees, whether they be in Israel, South Africa, Russia, China, Bengladesh, or in the United States. With an growing world population and an increased competition for limited resources, the exploitation will inevitably increase, just as the backlash against them will become more severe.

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