Monica Denevan: Burma

Photo © Monica Denevan-All Rights Reserved

I'm glad to have found Monica Denevan's website with its gorgeous photographs of Burma and China. Trust me...you will find that her some 120 photographs are indeed luminous and gorgeous.

Monica travels with her medium format Bronica, one lens, and a bunch of plastic bags filled with Ilford Delta 400 film. She tells us that her photographs are printed from negatives in her traditional darkroom and selenium toned.

Classic photography in the full meaning of the word, and the farthest thing from the Instagram and Hipstamatic fad.

Born in San Francisco, Monica studied photography at San Francisco State University. She started visiting parts of Burma and China for many years, and always had her Bronica along. Her work was published in ZYZZYVA, Communication Arts Photo Annual, SHOTS, Black and White Magazine, The Photo Review, The Sun, and Artvas-The Photo (Korea) among others.

She is represented by Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco, Duncan Miller Gallery in Santa Monica, Capital Culture Gallery in London, and Tao Evolution Gallery in Hong Kong which produced a small catalogue of her work. Monica’s photographs are in the permanent collection of UCSF Medical Center.

Kevin WY Lee: The Return of Hundred Daughters

Photo © Kevin Wy Lee-All Rights Reserved

"...a fortune teller told my grandparents that demon gods wished harm upon their first-born son. So when my father, the only son in the family, was born, they named him Pak Noi – Hundred Daughters – to fool the demon gods."

Kevin WY Lee is a photographer based in Singapore, whose creative work was honed in Australia and Singapore for more than 15 years. He's the founder of Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA); a well known multi-faceted platform for Street Photography & Visual Journalism in Asia. He also participated as a judge for various creative and photography awards including Singapore Creative Circle Awards, Angkor Photo Workshop, and KLPhotoawards.

Kevin's just recently featured a fascinating photo essay which chronicles the return of his father to his  ancestral home in Zhaolong Li (mainland China) after a prolonged absence of almost 56 years. He was accompanied by his wife, his sisters and families as well as his only son, Kevin...who documented this incredibly touching and intimate experience, and recorded it for posterity.

Because of a fortune teller's tale, Kevin's father was named Pak Noi (Hundred Daughters), and it's utterly appropriate it's also the title of this very well done photo essay.

As I'm fond of stressing in my multimedia classes, a photo essay of that type is always successful if it has two main ingredients: access and intimacy. The Return of Hundred Daughters certainly has both.

I only wish it had an accompanying audio track to it...but perhaps not having one was a conscious decision by the photographer.

Mauriã Rodrigues Sabbado: Opera Of Sichuan

Photo © Mauriã Rodrigues Sabbado-All Rights Reserved

I was glad to see that Mauriã Rodrigues Sabbado, a Brazilian photographer and a member of my class Introduction To Multimedia Storytelling at the Buenos Aires Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, has recently updated his website with six photo galleries.

Mauriã's documentary photography is centered on Asia, and particularly on Tibet and China. I highlight his gallery Sichuan Opera, which documents a troupe whilst preparing for a performance, and the actual performance itself.

Sichuanese opera is a type of Chinese opera originating in China's Sichuan province around 1700, with Chengdu being its main home. It's well known for its singing, which is more free than the popular Beijing opera form. Sichuan opera is more like a play than other forms of Chinese opera, and the acting is very professional. The music accompanying Sichuanese opera utilizes a small gong and a two stringed traditional "violin".

Li Wei: The Earth (Mongolia)

Photo © Li Wei-All Rights Reserved

Li Wei is a freelance photographer based in Beijing, who was born in Hohhot,Inner Mongolia, and who graduated from the Communication University of China.

His photographs of Inner Mongolia are those of an insider...no tourist stuff here, nor are the photographs the type one sees in glossy magazines advertising Mongolian lifestyle.

Inner Mongolia (distinct from the country of Mongolia) is an autonomous region of China, located in the northern region of the country. It shares an international border with the country of Mongolia and the Russian Federation. Han Chinese are the largest ethnic group, constituting about 80% of the population, followed by Mongols.

Asia Society: Hutongs

Click Link Below For Movie

I always have the highest of hopes for the Asia Society's web site, but it always manages to underwhelm me. Its web site seems somehow anchored in the nineties, with timid multimedia features, and its navigation is confusing. It almost seems to me as if I ventured in a government web site, with dry, clinical and unimaginative display of its many events.

Having said that, it has featured an interesting collection of videos on the Hutongs, the traditional narrow streets or alleys, most commonly associated with Beijing. Hutongs are alleys formed by lines of traditional courtyard residences. Many have been demolished to make way for high rise buildings, and the few remaining are threatened.

Hutongs were created during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) when Kublai Khan founded Beijing as the capital. All closed courtyards were built in a neat layout, and the hutongs were originally all 30 feet in width, allowing plenty of sunshine. During the dynasties, small hutongs were formed within the existing ones, making them overly crowded.

Don't miss the still photographs slideshow of old hutongs!

Joseph F. C. Rock: Western China

Photo © Joseph Francis Charles Rock

Joseph Francis Charles Rock (1884 – 1962) was an Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and anthropologist. For more than 25 years, he traveled extensively through Tibet and Yunnan, Gansu, and Szechuan provinces in China before finally leaving in 1949.

His travels in Western China is featured by On Shadow, and I thought I'd show the gallery of his more than 275 photographs made in the 1920s. It's always fascinating to me to view photographs made during these early years of photography, which required lugging heavy cameras and large amounts of developing chemicals. What we present-day photographers carry is a mere trifle of what these photographers had to schlep. They certainly had porters to do it for them, but imagine the difficulties this still was, as well as having to develop the films in situ.

For those of you who are patient and interested enough to scroll through the 275 images, you'll notice one that is captioned as "Lamas with trumpets, drums, and cymbals chanting the prelude to the Black Hat Dance in front of the main chanting hall at Cho-ni Lamasery" and was taken in December 1925. Compare it with contemporary photographs of Bhutan's Black Hat dances at its tsechus, and you'll realize that not much has changed.

On Shadow is primarily run by Nicholas Calcott, and was founded in January 2008, originally as the blog arm of the publisher 12th Press. It presents projects and essays from invited scholars and artists.

Robert Gauthier: China Journal

Photo © Robert Gauthier-All Rights Reserved- Courtesy Los Angeles Times

As I'm still "suffering" from the afterglow (albeit, and regrettably, only a second-hand one) of the momentous events in Cairo, and from the visual overload of my 2 weeks photo expedition in Gujarat, it was about time to feature photographic work from a different part of the world...

The Los Angeles Times' Framework featured Robert Gauthier's Behind The Lens: A Photographer’s China journal.

I find similar behind the scene journal entries by photographers and photojournalists very interesting, as these provide insight as to what worked, what didn't and what went through their minds as they go about doing their business....whether it was jubilation at getting a "money shot"...or the disappointment at not getting what was expected.

Gauthier writes:

"Here’s the money shot,” I thought. As a photojournalist, I try to anticipate moments that help illustrate the thesis of the story. In my mind’s eye, I pictured Li, arriving home after months away. Children scrambling into his arms, a loving wife’s long embrace, tears of happiness streaming from everyone’s face.


Zonk! Instead, a hesitant father politely introduces his reluctant wife as the children stay outside. We all stand awkwardly in a dimly lighted living room. Li nowhere near his wife. No Norman Rockwell moment here. This is how stories like these generally go. You have to expect the unexpected."

We have all experienced this very same feeling. We build our expectations up; partly because we are wishful thinkers when it comes to our photography, and imagine the "perfect" scenes before we get to them...and partly because we frequently misinterpret how other people react.

Yes, indeed. We have to expect the unexpected...and be realistic in our expectations. I know...that last bit of advice is silly. We can never do that.

In Focus Does Lantern Festival

Photo © Jason Lee-Courtesy In Focus-All Rights Reserved

The new photo blog In Focus by Alan Taylor for The Atlantic featured about 33 photographs of the festivities on the occasion of the Lunar New Year. The Lantern Festival (known as Yuan Xiao Jie) was observed yesterday in China and wherever there are Chinese communities. It's the last day of the Chinese Lunar New Year festivities.

The blurb accompanying the photographs informs us that it's the most important annual celebration in China, and welcomes the Year of the Rabbit...which is a year of caution and calm.

Calm and caution? I guess the Arab nations revolting for their freedom are unconcerned with the Year of the Rabbit!!

I sense In Focus will soon be one of the favored destinations for those of us who appreciate photojournalism at its best...especially as I just noticed that it offers two choices for its image size: 1024 or 1280 pixels! Nice touch...very nice touch!

Katharina Hesse: Human Negotiations (& Interview)

Katharina Hesse is a photographer who currently works in China and Asia, and has been based in Beijing for the past 17 years. She graduated in Chinese and Japanese studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris.

She has recently uploaded some of her gripping photographs of Bangkok's sex industry unto a 6 minutes-movie which she titled Human Negotiations (above), and during which she also talks about her project in a Skype-interview with Elisabetta Tripodi, and which appeared on the blog e-photoreview.

Human Negotiations is an experimental two-year collaboration between Katharina and writer Lara Day, using images and text to explore the lives of a community of Bangkok sex workers. I cannot begin to fathom how Katharina managed to gain the trust and confidence of her subjects to such a degree...and she says as such in her interview, and that the most important task in her project was to gain the trust of the sex workers and their clients. All serious photographers agree with her advice, since only full and complete mutual trust gained over months and months can make such intimate projects possible.

Katharina's has an impressive background. Not only is she a self-taught photographer (always a huge plus for me), but she 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’s news service. Her images were featured in numerous publications such as Courrier International, Der Spiegel, D della Repubblica, EYEmazing, Zeit Magazin, Glamour (Germany), IO Donna, Die Zeit, Marie-Claire, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, Neon, Newsweek, 100Eyes.org , Reporters without borders(yearbook 2010, Germany), Stern, Time Asia, Vanity Fair (Italy/Germany), and Wired (Italy) among others.

Katharina's photographs of Xinjiang, Kashgar and Urumqi are probably the best I've seen of that region....so go to her website after you watch the above movie.

Tatiana Cardeal: Ancient China

Photo © Tatiana Cardeal-All Rights Reserved

Tatiana Cardeal is a photographer, a visual artist (and a dreamer). She's a Brazilian independent photographer based in Sao Paulo, who spent her early career as an art director and graphic designer for international magazines. In 2003, she shifted her focus to photography and started to document social, cultural and human right issues where she made her mark.

Her particular interest is in South American indigenous people, but she just featured really terrific photographs of China in this portfolio which she titled Ancient China. I suspect that it's brand new as some of its captions are yet incomplete.

Clients and publications of her images include work with Amnesty International, Childhood Foundation, OXFAM International, Fundación AVINA, The UN Institute for Disarmament Research, Forum Syd, World Pulse and the medias The Independent, WOZ newspaper, National Geographic Channel, Deutsche Welle, and the magazines The New Internationalist, Courrier International, Max, Plenty, Tomorrow, Oryx In-Flight, AFAR, WIENERIN, Annabelle,The Big Issue and YES!

Female Imams In China

Here's a multimedia feature on Female Imams in China by Sharron Lovell, a freelance photographer currently based between Tel Aviv and Shanghai, and represented by Polaris. She prefers storytelling over single images, and has covered a number of issues in China from HIV/Aids, Islam and internal migration.

Sharron also completed assignments on Afghanistan’s first elections and the commercial sex caste in Pakistan. Her work was featured in National Geographic, The Guardian, Le Monde, Newsweek, Global Post, Politiken and various UNICEF campaigns.

NPR informs us that China has an estimated 21 million Muslims, who have developed their own set of Islamic practices with Chinese characteristics. The biggest difference is the development of independent women's mosques with female imams, something scholars who have researched the issue say is unique to China. In most of the Muslim world, women pray behind a partition or in a separate room, but in the same mosque as men.

It seems the Qur'an does not address this issue, and it's debatable whether the practice in the Arab world is reflective of true Islam, and not the result of patriarchal (misogynist) interpretations of religious texts.

France Television: Portraits Of A New World

Here's a superb multimedia presentation guaranteed to knock your socks off.

It's part of a collection of 24 multimedia documentaries produced by France Télévisions. Portraits Of A New World is a narrative of the world of the 21st century, and the upheavals which transform and influence our destinies.

Unfortunately, it's only in French with no subtitles, which sadly reduces its internationalization and its appreciation by non-French speaking audience.

Having said that, take a look nevertheless at Journal of A Concubine which, in my view, is the segment that most beautifully merges the techniques of photojournalism and videojournalism.

In the era of pre-Communist China, wives and concubines lived under the same roof; in full sight and knowledge of everyone. The practice was legal and widely accepted. In 1949, it was made illegal by Mao as being a relic of feudalism, but has reappeared with a modern twist in the 1990s with the economic resurgence of China. Concubines are now viewed as a sign of wealth especially in business circles.

This being a French production, the nuanced difference between concubines and mistresses is explained. The latter do not expect gifts nor monetary rewards. Concubines do.

Seen on the incomparable Duckrabbit

Xiaomei Chen: Puzhu

Photo © Xiaomei Chen-All Rights Reserved

Hands in Chinese Hakka culture are often a metaphor for the ability to work and survive; a symbol for diligence. "If you have hands, you never beg" the Hakka say.

And so reads a caption under one of Xiaomei Chen's photographs in her Puzhu gallery.

Xiaomei Chen had to choose between a Phd and a camera, and the camera won. Since 2006, she has been documenting human lives with it, using her background in anthropology. She's currently living in the US, and works as a contractor at The Washington Post. Having been a teacher in south China, she's fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka.

She embarked on a visual project documenting Puzhu, an obscure and shrinking village of 45 people in south China which mirrors what China has been going through in the past century. Farmers are leaving their land to earn better pay in the big cities such as Shanghai, leaving their centuries-old houses and way of life.

Puzhu In Transition was produced in partial fulfillment of a Masters of Art degree requirement for the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. It consist of stills, video and a book.

The book is available for sale on Blurb.

Hamid Sardar: Mongolia

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a photographer and a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia, and determined to document its nomadic culture by setting a mobile studio ger camp in Mongolia. With his arsenal of cameras and different formats, he mounts yearly expeditions into the Mongolian outback to document her nomadic traditions.

Apart from the two movie documentaries (these are not short, and run for almost an hour), take a look at Hamid's photographic gallery titled Dark Heavens, which has color and platinum portfolios.

Photo © Hamid Sardar-All Rights Reserved

Impressive, huh? Especially since Hamid is able to combine the two imagery disciplines so well.

I was introduced to Hamid Sardar's work and website through The Empty Quarter Gallery newsletter.

Wenjie Yang: Nuo Opera

Photo © Wenjie Yang-All Rights Reserved
Wenjie Yang is a freelance photographer, who was born and raised in Shanghai. She comes to photography and photojournalism with a background in advertising production and production of movie crews for a number of years.

She currently attends the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism One-Year Certificate Program at International Center of Photography, and worked on editorial assignments from various magazines, including “Travel + Leisure”, “Marie Claire”, “Elle Decoration”, "Burn Magazine" and “Chinese Photographers”. She also was awarded third prize in the 2008 National Geographic International Photography Contest (China Region).

Wenjie introduces us to Nuo Opera through her photo essay here.

Nuo opera is an ancient and a popular folk opera in southwest China. It is characterized by the use of frightening masks, characteristic dresses, strange language used in its performances, and mysterious scenes. It integrates religious and dramatic culture, and its performance aims drive away evil spirits, disease and unholy influences, as well as supplicate blessings from the gods.

Traditionally, Nuo is performed by specially trained shamans as a means of exorcism. In fact, the professional Nuo performers are viewed as "spiritual tutors" wielding supernatural powers to disperse evil spirits, sickness and disease.

Howard W. French: Old Shanghai

Photo © Howard W. French -All Rights Reserved
The NY Times featured Howard French's exquisite portfolio of black & white photographs of residents of old Shanghai's densely packed neighborhoods inside their own homes, which is titled Discovering Shanghai's Secret City.

I was so taken by this type of work (and I guarantee you will too) that I looked for Howard French's other work and discovered his main photography website, and his equally wonderful Disappearing Shanghai: The Landscape Within among other galleries.

Howard French lived in Shanghai from 2003-2008 as chief of The Times’s bureau, and spent many weekends exploring the lesser known areas of Shanghai or the "densely packed place of tumbledown, two-story housing and long internal alleyways" as he describes them. He became a familiar sight for many of the residents, and knew what to expect at every corner, whther it'd be a mahjong game or a regular siting in a chair in his pajamas.

He returned to Shanghai last summer and for three months, he knocked on the doors of homes and asked himself in to document what he encountered.

To me, this is what documentary photography is all about. The photographer as a fly on the wall...seemingly unnoticed by his subjects...who perhaps either ignore his presence, got used to it or tolerate it....and from these frames, one can build a storyline. In the photograph above, the woman on the left is laughing at something/someone outside of the frame, and the younger woman looks at her somewhat pensively, while a third person is lying on the bed, possibly asleep. Can we guess the dynamics in this photograph? The wedding photograph hanging from the wall begs the question: is the bride and groom present in the room? Are they the laughing woman and the sleeping figure? Is the young woman their daughter?

Simple yet complex. I love it.

FP: Tomas van Houtryve's Maostalgia

Photo © Tomas van Houtryve-All Rights Reserved
When one thinks of Foreign Policy magazine, large photographs and photo essays don't really come to mind...but that would be incorrect. The magazine regularly features photo essays from well-known photojournalist and, contrary to many online newsy magazines, does a nice job showcasing them in a large size.

This month, Foreign Policy published Maostalgia, a photo essay by Tomas van Houtryve, who traveled in the heart of China and found Mao's legacy in the most unexpected places.

For instance, he photographed in the town of Nanjie, where its government provides for all its citizens' needs, supplying them with everything from cough medicine to funerals.

A different take from the recent photo essays on glitzy China we've been accustomed to see, and which for the most part extol the virtues of the Chinese economy.

Tomas van Houtryve is a documentary photojournalist who spent much of the past five years photographing the few remaining countries still under Communist Party rule. His 2009 photo essay for FP on North Korea, "The Land of No Smiles," was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

More of his images on China can be seen here.

Bruno Barbey: Shanghai World Expo

Not entirely travel photography related but Magnum In Motion is featuring an audio slideshow of Bruno Barbey's photographs of the construction of Shanghai's World Expo construction site and parts of its old city.

Shanghai saw the opening of the 2010 World Expo today, starting an event to herald the Chinese financial hub's return as a major world city after the spartan industrialism following the 1949 communist revolution.

According to the news reports here in the UK, no expense was spared and like the 2008 Olympics, the World Expo will showcase China's immense economic and geopolitical importance; almost bragging its power and influence.

I haven't been to Shanghai yet, but it's quite obvious the degree by which China has developed, and is continuing to develop its main cities. It's in stark contrast with the crumbling infrastructure of many large cities in the United States.

China is spending over $4.0 billion on the Expo itself, and many billions more on other improvements for this city of 20 million people. While in the United States, we are faced with economic difficulties caused by the mismanagement of the Bush Administration, the spectacle of hypocritical Tea Baggers and a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's depressing.

Ashok Sinha: Kashgar

Photo © Ashok Sinha-All Rights Reserved
Here's another photo gallery of Kashgar and the Uyghurs by photographer Ashok Sinha, who traveled in China and was touched by their plight, which prompted him to document their disappearing ways of life. The photo essay is part of a larger project that is titled Life in Balance: The Human Condition in Xinjiang.

Kashgar is a city of 3.4 million surrounded by mountains and desert, and is located at Xinjiang's westernmost tip. It is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing. As a minority, the Uyghurs see their 2000 year-old culture and heritage being erased by the Chinese authorities, with much of Kashgar's old town being demolished. This was justified by the Chinese for safeguarding the population from the collapse of the old buildings in the event of an earthquake, and that the demolition is necessary to the “modernization” of the Uyghur people.

The old city is considered to be one of Central Asia's best preserved sites of Islamic architecture.

The New York Times has featured an audio slideshow on Kahsgar just under a year ago titled A City, and People, at Crossroads that explains the situation.

Stephen JB Kelly: Qi Lihe

Photo © Stephen JB Kelly-All Rights Reserved
Stephen JB Kelly is an English photographer, currently based in Hong Kong. He obtained a diploma in Photography from the London College of Communication, which was followed by a degree in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport.

Aside from winning a number of awards for his photography, Stephen has been published in various magazines including The Independent Magazine, The Observer Magazine, D La Repubblica delle Donne, IL Magazine and The FADER Magazine.

One of his portfolios is of Qi Lihe, on the outskirts of Lanzhou which is the most destitute area of this heavily polluted industrial city in northwest China. During the recent years, there has been an influx of migrant Hui and Dongxiang Muslim minorities into these urban centers. The main cause of the influx is the desertification of their land, forcing these farmers and families to seek a better existence in Lanzhou.

The Hui’s ancestors were Silk Road traders, largely of Arab and Persian descent, who first came to China in the 7th Century. The Dongxiang are closely related to the Mongolians and as an independent ethnic group they arose through contact with Central Asians who converted them to Sunni Islam in the 13th century.