China. The Taklamakan Desert. 2009

The ‘Sea of Death’ is the not-so affectionate name that has been given by the Chinese people to the Taklamakan desert, a desert of such epic proportions and intimidating size, that its name in the local Uygur language translates as ‘You can go in, but you will never come out’.

I visited the Taklamakan desert as part of my work on the issue of desertification in China for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in April of this year and this is one of my favourote images, that I’d like to share with you as this week’s ‘Photo of the Week’.

Photographing in the Taklamakan

The trees in the images are dead poplar trees, on the edges of the Taklamakan. As the desert moves, whole forests of trees are engulfed by the sand and huge swathes of land are reduced to no more than forest graveyards. It is an eerie and unnerving place, conjuring up the image of the aftermath of some epic disaster. Well, this is a disaster, an environmental disaster in China on the grandest scale. The significance of which is slowly dawning on people. This is where I have tried to come in by visually communicating the scale of this under-reported issue.

There are some interesting and exciting developments happening for this work at the moment that I’d love to share with you but I dare not talk about it, in case I jinx it. If and when these developments happen, the news will be out here on my blog first, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please spread the word about this issue.

Charlotte, poses for a photo, during a break between classes. 2007

*This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ is an image from my story on the Bethel Training Center for Blind Orphans, currently being featured on the Photophilanthropy website. Below is the extract which supports the story. To see more images from this story, please click on the Photophilanthropy link.”

“I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.” – Helen Keller, Blind and Deaf US Writer.

There are around 500,000 blind and visually impaired children in China. As a result of China’s strict one-child policy, children born with physical or mental disabilities are regularly abandoned as parents strive to have their only child born ‘normal’ and well.

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Diwali celebrations in Trafalgar Square, London. UK. 2004

A friend of mine reminded me this weekend that it was the Hindu festival of Diwali this week. In case you don’t know, Divali (or the Festival of Light as it is also called) is a celebration held over 5 days by Hindu communities throughout the world. Lights are lit, fireworks are set off and families come together for this important day.

Diwali celebrations in Trafalgar Square, London. UK. 2004

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ comes from Diwali celebrations, not in India, but in London. I took them in 2004, during my one year paid internship at Magnum Photo’s London office. I remember having only been at Magnum for a couple of months when this festival came about. Having been inspired day-in-day-out (as I was for most of the year) I headed out onto the streets to try and capture some of the colour and fervour that surrounded the festival on the streets of the UK’s capital. I’d like to share five of those images with you taken during celebrations in 2004.

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Pedestrians in downtown Hong Kong. 2008

This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ takes us to Hong Kong. I first visited Hong Kong in November of 2008 and was completely taken by this unique and exciting city. 155 years of British colonial rule have obviously left a lot of British influence and I immediately felt at home in what was a place that seemed to have the feelings of both China and Britain, blended together into a unique anglo-sino melting pot.

The above photo was taken on one of the main shopping streets on Hong Kong island. I like this image for one reason really, the colour. I often look for singular colours in images in order to simplify the picture. Whilst out wandering the streets, my attention was obviously caught by the radiating neon signs that jumped out from the shop window. Having seen such a situation, I then decided to stand and wait for pedestrians to walk past in order to create an image with an interesting composition. I didn’t just want a straight shot of the window. I wanted to somehow convey the movement and dynamics of Hong Kong in the one frame.

After returning to my computer and looking closer at this image, other elements started to reveal themselves to me. The condensation on the window for example, running in streaks vertically down the glass. The way that the shapes and lines of the two people’s faces seem to fit together like a puzzle, in a way that reminds me of two continents that were once joined but have slowly separated over time. It’s always great to discover more elements in an image that you don’t realise are there when you first capture it.

A Japanese child, perched on his mother's bike. 2003

I was trawling through my archive today, looking for images to accompany a presentation that I am giving as part of my workshop tomorrow. As I looked through my ‘older’ files, I stumbled upon many of my images that I took while I lived in Japan between 2003-2004. I had just finished University and I was quite unsure about what direction my life was taking. Having been dabbling in photography for a year or two, I decided to take myself off to Japan in order to experience a completely alien culture to my own and see what it brought out in me photographically.

At the time I did not work as a professional photographer. I was on the JET programme, an initiative run by the Japanese government that brought native English speakers to the country to teach schoolchildren. I was based in the small and little-known town of Himeji, on the coast, south of the larger cities of Kobe and Osaka. My main school was in Himeji itself, however for two days of the week I would get on a boat and head out to a small group of islands off the Japanese coast to teach in a school that served the small archipelago.

My daily commute involved a 20 minute bike ride to the local docks, a 25 minute speedboat ride and then another 20 minute bike ride to the school. Not the worst way to travel to work! On one of my commutes whilst cycling on the small islands, I stopped at a small junction and saw this young Japanese buy perched on his mother’s bike. Using my small Minolta Dynax 5, loaded with my favourite film at the time, Fuji Velvia 50, I snapped this one frame of the boy.

I love this photo, as it is one of the first portraits that I was truly happy with and it takes me straight back to my experience of living and working in Japan. The islands (called Ieshima, by the way) were a unique place, and like Japan, hold a special place in my memories living, working and travelling in Asia.

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.

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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.

China. Spiderman on the Great Wall of China. 2006

First, I need to apologise for my lack of a ‘Photo of the Week’ last week. I know many of you stopped by expecting to see a new image. I was on assignment in a place that had no internet and was completely out of touch with the outside world for almost the whole week. I can’t reveal too much now but I promise to have an exciting new set of images (and maybe more) of my work from this place. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you may already have an idea of where I have been.

In the meantime, here is a photo that I have wanted to post for some time now. This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ was taken a few years ago on the Great Wall of China and depicts ‘Spiderman’ enjoying this world famous tourist attraction!

The image was taken during China’s national holidays which occur annually at the beginning of October. I couldn’t wait to show this photo as it is one of my favourites. It is somewhat random but I like this factor in the image and like the unexpected appearance of a very modern figure on one of mankind’s most recognisable and ancient structures.

An advertising hoarding in Beijing featuring Yao Ming, China's leading basketball player and Tiger Woods. 2006

I received a picture request this week from a client for images of golf in China. While I was searching through my archive, I stumbled upon this image that I took in 2006, just after I arrived in Beijing for my second time. The image was taken on Beijing’s main Wangfujing high street, which is one of the city’s shopping districts, popular with visiting tourists, both Chinese and foreign.

Many photographers use the approach of first searching for a backdrop, in order to create a picture. They wander, they look, constantly searching for a background that will serve as almost a ‘stage’ for which they will wait until the passing ‘actors’ all fall into place. That is exactly the approach I took with this photograph. Upon seeing this advertising hoarding, with the huge figures of Yao Ming and Tiger Woods looming over the shopping street, I knew it would make an interesting composition, if I was able to work the moving elements of the pedestrians into the frame too. So, I sat and I waited. Waiting for all the ‘actors’ to pass by and fall into place.

I enjoy the symmetry of this photo, how the passing pedestrians form almost a triangle in the bottom portion of the frame and the figures of Woods and Yao Ming stand like pillars to either side, helping to frame the photograph.

“All the world’s a stage, And all men and women are merely players. They have their exits and entrances.” – As You Like It – Shakespeare