SPECIAL 1-DAY OCTOBER HOLIDAY WORKSHOP – “Hutong Photography”

Dates: Tuesday 6th October 2009 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Course Leaders: Photographer Sean Gallagher & Guide/Interpreter Jessica Zheng

Location: The Far East International Youth Hostel, Beijing

Participants: Minimum 5 people, Maximum 10 people (Registration is on a first-come first-serve basis)

Student Level: Beginner/Intermediate – All ages welcome!

Cost: 499 Chinese Renminbi per person*

As the October holidays are upon us here in Beijing, a special workshop has been organised to focus on one of the special areas that makes the Chinese capital so unique…the hutongs!

A young boy in the Qianmen hutongs.

During this workshop, we shall focus on photographing the unique, remaining pockets of life that exist in the hutongs of central Qianmen district. Photographer Sean Gallagher will guide you through these maze-like communities to show you the best ways to approach and photograph the people and architecture. Along with tuition ‘on the street’ we will also cover the basics of photography before we head out, to make sure you are getting the most out of your camera. Professional guide and interpreter Jessica Zheng will be on hand at all times to offer you insights into the background and history of the hutongs and will also give a brief lesson in ‘Photography Chinese’, key words and phrases you need when photographing people.

Continue Reading »

CHINA. Beijing. A young girl plays in the destroyed remains of hutongs (traditional homes) in central Beijing near Tiananmen Square. The hutongs are being destroyed to make way for new developments aimed at modernising the city for the 2008 Olympic Games. 2006.

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ was taken in 2006 as part of a story that I did on the destruction of the ‘hutongs’ of central Beijing. For those of you who aren’t aware, the hutongs are a maze-like series of homes and dwellings that used to dominate central Beijing. I say used to because many of them were destroyed in the run-up to the Olympic Games as the city strived to modernise in anticipation of all the visiting eyes that would be looking upon the city.

Whilst the hutongs were arguably a backwards way of living and inefficiently used space, they represented an relatively unchanged age of Beijing that dated back hundreds of years, even as far back as when the Mongolians ruled the capital. Controversy arose also during the destruction of the hutongs as reports emerged of forced evictions and residents not being given adequate compensation.

During my first trip to Beijing in 2005 (sponsored by a grant I received after completing my internship at Magnum Photos) and during 2006, I documented the destruction that had been taking place in the center of the city. You can view more of the images here, at the website OpenDemocracy.net.

CHINA. The burnt out remains of the 'New Oriental Hotel' in central Beijing. 2009

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from my wanderings on the streets of my Chinese hometown of Beijing. Last week I had a two-day assignment for my German agency Laif, who had arranged for me to shoot a story on Beijing’s infrastructure. Whilst meandering through Beijing’s CBD district, Guomao, the amazing light that afternoon drew my attention to the gleaming architecture of the area.

As they shone in the dying afternoon light, one building in particular drew my attention. It was the remains of the ‘New Mandarin Oriental Hotel’, which was burnt down in February by a rogue firework that started the blaze during Spring Festival celebrations. The building still stands in Guomao, next to the quite beautiful CCTV building (to the right, off camera).

I was drawn to this picture from my days shooting mainly because of the colours that grace the burnt girders and framework of what remains of the building. Against the background of a brilliant blue sky, which have been so rare in Beijing since I moved here 3 years ago, it was hard not to feel somewhat sad at this image before me. The vain attempt of the white barrier at the front of the tower, seems to try hard to distract and deflect attention away from the burnt corpse, but conversely seems to highlight the scale of the destruction.

Continue Reading »

I just noticed today that I haven’t had a new post up for 10 days! Wow. I have been quite busy of late, having just got back from a shoot in the Chinese city of Hangzhou where I teamed up again with the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon for a new story. More on that to come in later posts.

A lot of my work appeared online in various blogs and magazines this week, which was great.

Burn Magazine Logo

On David Alan Harvey’s magazine, Burn, he published a short selection of my images that I took from the recent trip I took to North Korea. David edited these images himself actually, sequencing them also in the way he saw best fit. If you read the dialogue, he offers a few insights into how he went about this and his thoughts on editing. As this work is quite new to me, I was more than happy for David to help me create a voice for this work. To see what he came up with, go here.

Resolve Logo

Also, over on the liveBooks’ blog RESOLVE (for whom I am a regular contributor) my final post about some of my experiences photographing desertification for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, went up this week. If you missed some my earlier writings for RESOLVE, please go here, here and here to see them.

Duckrabbit Logo

Finally and by no means least, the excellent multimedia website duckrabbit featured a short highlight of some of my recent work focusing on both my desertification work and that in North Korea.

I can’t encourage you enough to go and check out all three of the above outlets. They are all very exciting venues for photography online at the moment.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxSifGgJsbs[/youtube]

This is the third and final installment of mine and Mark MacKinnon’s short videos from our trip in North Korea.

This third video focuses on the Chinese city of Dandong, which lies on the North Korea/China border and offers a startling contrast between the two sides of the Yalu river. Whilst the city of Dandong thrives, fuelled by the economic boom in many of China’s cities, the North Korean side is devoid of life, except for the odd fishing boat and abandoned building.

I hope you have enjoyed this set of three videos. In case you missed the other two, please find the first one “Inside North Korea” here and the second, “The Arirang Mass Games” here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1-X3-gNP0[/youtube]

The above video is the second short-video by myself and the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon from our assignment in North Korea. The topic of this video is the Arirang Mass Games which are held in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang.

In case you don’t know, the Mass Games are a gymnastics, dance and song spectacular that showcase North Korean history and culture. Using hundreds of participants, mostly schoolchildren, the games are an imposing and impressive sight which symbolise the power of the masses working as one in North Korea.

Apart from the huge overtones of propaganda, the show is actually quite breathtaking. My personal favourite part of the event are the hundreds of schoolchildren who provide the backdrop to the whole spectacle. Holding up books containing pages with different colours, they all open and close the books in unison to create the unbelievable moving backdrop.

If you missed the first video, you can view it here.

NORTH KOREA. A family huddle together in Kaesong city near Panmunjom, the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. 2009

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from North Korea. I wanted to post a photo from NK as last week’s POTW but I held off as I was waiting until the Globe & Mail, who commissioned the shoot, published the  images on their website.

Throughout my journey with the G&M’s Mark MacKinnon, we were whizzed across the country from site to site, trapped in our own oversized minivan which could of held about 15 people but was strangely reserved only for us two. We spent a lot of time in this van and it was from this viewpoint that I was able to gain many of my shots from the country, capturing glimpses of normal life between the government approved sites.

This week’s POTW is one of those photos and for me captures a very brief slice of normal North Korean family life, with the subjects completely unaware a picture is being taken. The children huddling in the shade of their mother’s umbrella. The father, crouched nearly out of sight. The other passers-by. This is was one of the hardest pictures to get. A normal picture. An insight. A brief glimpse.

To see more of the pictures from the series, please head to the Globe & Mail’s website here and to view our first of three short videos about North Korea and our trip, please go here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BHVnG3m7BU[/youtube]

As some of you may already know, last week I was on assignment in North Korea. Forgive me for not giving a hint of this exciting assignment beforehand, however myself and Mark MacKinnon from Canada’s Globe & Mail, for whom I was working, wanted to try and keep this as quiet as possible until (a) we made it out safely and (b) the work was first published on the G&M website.

Well, we are now back in Beijing and are happy to show the first of three videos shot from the trip. This is the first video I have ever shot, all done on a very touristy camcorder as not to raise suspicions, but I’m very happy with the results, especially considering the conditions we were working under i.e. being watched at all times by our government minders.

Needless to say, this was the most eye-opening photo-assignment and traveling experience I have ever had and possibly the most nerve-wracking. Fresh off the back of the story of Euna Lee and Laura Lin, American journalists who were caught crossing the China-North Korea border, being sentenced to over 10 years in a labour camp and then subsequently being ‘rescued’ by Bill Clinton, Mark and I were obviously a little nervous about heading into the country. Would Bill come and rescue us too if something went wrong?!

I will be posting plenty more about our trip into North Korea, however please sit and enjoy the first installment of videos from the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. To read Mark’s excellent articles and diary entries from the trip please go here and to see more of my images from the trip, please go here. Scroll through day-by-day to see the images from each day in chronological order.

*Update* 09/09/09 To view video #2 “The Arirang Mass Games”, please go here and the view video #3, “On the North Korea/China border”, please go here.

'Mr Crazy English' (right) Li Yang, and myself after having been dragged onstage to participate in one of his classes in Beijing, whilst covering him on assignment for the Independent Magazine. 2009

I’ve had some pretty unique experiences so far working as a photographer. Last month however, I had quite a new one. Normally my style is to be as unobtrusive as possible – skirting the edges of an event, carefully shadowing a person, doing my utmost not to affect the situation which I am photographing. Whilst on assignment for the British newspaper, The Independent, I became completely and utterly part of the shoot and it wasn’t of my own accord! Let me explain…

I was on assignment to shoot a man called Li Yang, the founder of ‘Crazy English’, a unique school of English that has drawn national attention in China because its alternative teaching methods by its leader. To begin with, Li Yang’s classes normally have attendance figures in the hundreds. He teaches en masse. On the day I was shooting him, the class contained about 400-500 students, a little small according to members of Li’s entourage who told me he had just come back from teaching in a sports stadium in southern China to 10,000 people! As well as teaching en masse, Li’s style is to drive students into almost a frenzy, having them chant English sentences back to him after he reads them from his books.

So, there I was milling about the audience, trying to capture the fervour and over-excitement of many of the attendees and suddenly I caught the eye of Li Yang during a lull in his performance. Big mistake. “We have a foreign friend here with us today”, I heard Li say in Chinese to his students. “He’s a photographer”, he announced. Suddenly all 400-odd pairs of eyes were on me and my attempts at being inconspicuous were well and truly blown. I didn’t really know what to do at this point, so a polite smile and wave I thought, were the key to me being acknowledged and then ignored. No such luck. Li promptly asked his stewards to escort me onto the stage where he wanted to talk to me in-front of the students. My cover was well and truly blown.

SEE IMAGES OF A ‘CRAZY ENGLISH’ CLASS VIA MY ARCHIVE

Continue Reading »