The Great Wall of China at Laolongtou (plus ship)

I have visited the Great Wall of China nearly 20 times over my 6+ years in China. From hiking up its steep steps in the mountains north of Beijing to photographing the crumbling ruins in the country’s western desert regions, I have seen some beautiful sights.

This weekend however I saw perhaps the oddest scene I have witnessed in all my trips to the wall. A ship, run aground, having missed smashing into the wall by a matter of metres.

This scene is from the easternmost part of the Great Wall, at Laolongtou (Old Dragon’s Head) in Shanhaiguan, Hebei Provice, where the wall runs into the Bohai Sea. It’s obviously a very famous and well-visited part of the wall but it appears that someone took a wrong turn recently when trying to navigate this portion of coast in north-east China.

A unique Great Wall photo opportunity.

I wouldn’t of liked to have been the captain who realised that there was an imminent chance he was about to run into, and potentially destroy part of, perhaps the most iconic symbol of the whole nation.

According to local storeowners at the Lalongtou site, the ship ran aground in early November. As of yesterday, it hasn’t moved very far. Get there quick for a very unique Great Wall of China photo opportunity!

PetaPixel

North Korea news seems to have quietened down lately in the mainstream media but a couple of photo-related outlets recently picked up on my blog post ‘Inside North Korea: Photographing in the World’s Most Secretive Nation‘ which I re-posted here on the blog a couple of weeks ago. Click the link if you missed it when it was first posted.

Many thanks to PetaPixel and Feature Shoot for sharing the images and story with their followers. Please do check out their sites for an eclectic array of news and features from the photo-world.

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I just wanted to extend a big thank you to all of those who were able to make the opening of MELTDOWN at the weekend in Beijing. The opening was a great success and it was really encouraging to see so many people interested in this project.

A big thanks also to Southern Barbarian who were our hosts and put on a wonderful selection of drinks and delectible Yunnan-style food for us on the afternoon. The prints will be hanging for the next couple of months, so there is still plenty of time to see the show.

If you want to learn more about the project, please visit the Pulitzer Center site for slideshows and articles. There are a few more interesting developments with regards to this project coming soon, so please stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks!

Visitors stand next to ornate gates at the mausoleum for former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. 2009

Tensions are running high again on the Korean peninsula. As international observers watch closely for what move the North will play next, I thought it might be a good time to revisit some of my work from photographing in North Korea, undercover on-assignment, for the Globe & Mail in 2009.

Below is an extract from an article I contributed to the Digital Journalist the same year, recounting some of my experiences whilst photographing in this reclusive state. It was an experience I shall never forget…

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Last month, I got a call from the Globe & Mail‘s Asia correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, asking me if I was free in early September for a shoot. “Sure,” I said. I had been working with Mark a lot recently and was keen to work with him again. “I’m thinking of going to North Korea,” he said. “North Korea? Okay, I’m in,” I nonchalantly replied.

As our bus trundled across the bridge over the Yalu River that separates China and North Korea, my initial nonchalance had well and truly disappeared as we slowly approached the most closed nation on earth.

A North Korean family huddle together in Kaesong City near the DMZ. 2009

I was nervous because both Mark and I were posing as tourists, entering a country that was not exactly friendly to the foreign press. Immediately after the well-publicized rescue by former U.S. President Bill Clinton of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who had been caught illegally entering the country, this was maybe not the best time to be trying to sneak into North Korea. With Mark’s passport indicating his journalist credentials hidden (replaced by one with no such indications) and my camera broken up into as many parts as possible and spread around my person, we actually didn’t raise too many eyebrows as we quietly slipped onto a bus packed with Chinese tourists.

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MELTDOWN – Climate Change and Environmental Degradation on the Tibetan Plateau

Dear Friends, Followers and Readers,

I would like to invite you to the opening party for ‘MELTDOWN: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation on the Tibetan Plateau’, which will be taking place at Southern Barbarian in Beijing on Saturday 20th April from 3:00 until 6:00 p.m.

The exhibition will feature a selection of images from my travels last year documenting how climate change is affecting communities on the roof of the world.

MELTDOWN – Climate Change and Environmental Degradation on the Tibetan Plateau

On the afternoon, there will be free drinks and Yunnan-style snacks to sustain you as we enjoy a spring afternoon in the hutongs of central Beijing.

For more information and a map to the venue, please click here for City Weekend’s listing.

I look forward to seeing you there!

It’s that time of year again when David Alan Harvey (Magnum and National Geographic) and the Burn team search for their next recipient of the ‘Burn Emerging Photographer Fund‘.

Burn

The deadline is May 5, 2013 this year and with a total fund of US$ 15,000 for the chosen photographers. Its a serious amount of money that could make some new projects become a reality.

As readers of this blog may know, I was lucky enough to receive the for EPF in 2008. It made a significant impact on my early career and continues to do so today. It freed me up to pursue the projects that I really wanted to and gave me the confidence to follow my passion of covering environmental issues.

If you’d like to learn more about my application and the grant’s impact on me and my career, I wrote this blog post about it in 2011.

Good luck to all those who enter!

A jellyfish floats through the water in a tank at the Beijing Aquarium. Great lighting set-up beautifully illuminates these elegant creatures. 13th March, 2013.

Life in China is never dull. That’s one thing that I have learnt living here for the past 6 1/2 years. From one week to the next, there are stories in the news that will astound, surprise and just plain shock you.

Instagram

Visually, this also applies. The country continues to run at breakneck speed, developing itself and its economy, providing visual contradictions and juxtapositions at every turn. There are also quieter moments however, like those that appear in this post.

As well as my professional set-up, I use my iPhone to document my life as a professional photojournalist.

The iPhone and the photo-sharing app Instagram, have become an important part of my professional life, allowing me to share images with a new and wider audience than before.

I spoke with the British Journal of Photography last year about this and some of the impacts this is having on the world of professional photojournalism.

However you feel about the rise of photo sharing sites like Instagram, they are here to stay. They offer us a great way to introduce our work to new audiences and at the same time offer insights into our professional practise.

So, join me on Instagram at sean_gallagher_photo There will be plenty more images like the ones you see in this post. I hope that they will surprise you and help give you both a glimpse into my professional life and help you understand just a little more about China and the other countries in Asia that I travel to!

Time for a spot of tea on a springlike (albeit with slightly grey skies) afternoon in Beijing. 6th March, 2013.

Lindblom Math & Science Academy – Chicago – Photo by Mary Owen – Used with Permission

On Wednesday of this week, I had the unique experience of chatting online for this first time with middle school students at the Lindblom Math and Science Academy in Chicago.

This talk was set-up as part of the News Literacy Project, an organisation that aims to bring journalists into the classroom in the US to help students look critically about news that they are consuming on a day-to-day basis.

The News Literacy Project Website

“The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

The project teaches students critical-thinking skills that will enable them to be smarter and more frequent consumers and creators of credible information across all media and platforms. It seeks to light a spark of interest in students to seek information that will make them more knowledgeable about their communities, the nation and the world.” – The News Literacy Project Website

It was a real honour to be invited into the student’s classroom (in a cyber-sense) to talk about issues related to China, the nation’s economy, growth and the changes in life for the Chinese people. I tried to emphasise to the students that China, as a subject , is one that we all need to understand better as the world’s most populous nation begins to affect all of our lives.

Please click on the link above and check out some of the work the NLP is doing in bringing journalists into classrooms across the US.

Lindblom Math & Science Academy – Chicago – Photo by Mary Owen – Used with Permission

A Tibetan Plateau Diary

For the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. To view the full gallery of images.

“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us” — Oscar Wilde

I’ve never been one for keeping a diary. My parents encouraged me to keep one from a young age, but numerous half-filled notebooks are evidence of my failed attempts. Early on however, I realized that photography and the experience of looking at an image were much more effective in helping me to remember where and when I was at a certain place, but most importantly, what and how I was feeling when I was there.

This past summer and autumn, I traveled across the Tibetan Plateau, documenting some of the threats from climate change to the people and ecosystems of the “Roof of the World.” As I traveled, I carried with me my iPhone, along with my normal professional equipment.

A Tibetan Plateau Diary

For the past year and a half I have been taking pictures with my phone, mostly using it as a way to document smaller moments, or objects and things that I just wanted to record as a reminder for myself. This new tool has become my diary.

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A Tibetan nomad in the Amdo region of the Tibetan Plateau. 2012

For the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

“I was forced to move here three years ago. Before, I was a nomad. I’m not happy with what has happened,” explained Dhakpa as we stood on the dusty street corner. (Dhakpa’s name and those of other Tibetans in the story have been changed to protect their identity.) The wind swept through the valley in which we stood, dirt and sand swirling around our feet. Nearby, large piles of refuse started to shuffle at the edges as the wind picked up.

We were standing in the outskirts of the town of Zaduo, a bustling little Tibetan community in the southeast of Qinghai Province, on the border with the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Surrounded by mountains and rolling green highland grasslands, it was described in my guidebook as “one of the remote [towns] on the plateau.”

Before us lay dusty streets, flanked on either side by a series of one-story yellow buildings that made up a “relocation village” built a few years previously to house the new influx of Tibetan nomads from the surrounding grasslands.

Nestled deep in the Sanjiangyuan region of southern Qinghai, the grasslands are home to the sources of the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong Rivers. In recent decades, however, the grasslands on the “roof of the world” have become progressively degraded, many scientists believe as a result of rising temperatures and drying caused by climate change.

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