City Weekend

We were delighted to find out last week that Chelin Miller, who is a former student from one of out hutong workshops, was featured in Beijing City Weekend and interviewed about her experiences taking on of our classes. You can read a snippet of the interview here online and read it reproduced below. Well done Chelin! To see images from the workshop Chelin attended, please go here.

Snap Happy: Hutong Photography

*Amateur photographer Chelin Miller tells us why she hones her skills in Sean Gallagher’s photo workshops

What is it about photography that draws you?

Photos tell a story, preserve memories and can be a fantastic creative outlet.

Have you ever studied photography before?

I have never studied photography seriously, but I’ve had a passion for it since I was a teenager.

(c) City Weekend

How did you find the hands-on photography workshop?

There was a feeling of camaraderie from the beginning. We were eight in our group. Armed with our cameras, we went out around the hutong and although we were all together, we all perceived different aspects of the area, the people and the architecture. It was fascinating to come back to the hostel and review everybody’s photos; I think we all learned a lot from each other.

Is the workshop accessible to the camera challenged?

Yes, the workshop was very clear and concise. It covered enough basic technical and composition steps to be able to take good photos even if you were a total beginner, without slowing down the pace for those with a little bit more experience.

Will you be taking the workshop again?

Yes, definitely. I can’t wait to go to Harbin for the ice festival with Sean and Jessica’s group. Being with others who share my passion, making jokes, feeding ideas off each other and learning from each other is what makes the workshops so enjoyable.

]]> http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2010/02/05/former-student-of-hutong-photography-workshop-featured-in-city-weekend/feed/ 0 http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2010/01/10/interview-with-bbc-world-service/ http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2010/01/10/interview-with-bbc-world-service/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:37:53 +0000 Sean Gallagher http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/?p=1590

BBC World Service

Last month I was interviewed by the BBC World Service’s Outlook programme for an article on my work on desertification for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The interview ran over the new year and has proved to be a wonderful new way to spread the message about this issue (the BBC World Service gets around 37 million listeners worldwide apparently).

If you missed it, then you can click on this link here to listen to the entire interview.

Here is the text that ran on the BBC World Service Website:

“Some of the most striking images on display at December’s Copenhagen climate change conference were pictures of China taken by a young British photographer.

Sean Gallagher travelled across the world’s most populated country on what is known as the ‘desertification train.’

And he documented his journey in photos to show how life is a constant struggle for those living on the edges of China’s deserts.

BBC World Service

China is fighting a war against creeping sand – year on year its deserts are expanding and joining to create a massive dustbowl.

It is estimated that 20 per cent of China’s land area – some 1.74 million square kilometers – is now classified as desert.

One of the main stops on Sean’s trip was Hongsibao – an environmental refugee town built from scratch by the Chinese Government to house those forced from their homes by the sandstorms and water shortages.

Lucy Ash spoke to Sean and asked him how these environmental refugees feel about their new home.”

New York Times' Lens Blog

A couple of online publications this week that I’d like to share with you this week.

NYT

The first one was on the New York Times’ Lens Blog which appeared on their site on Tuesday. James Estrin of the NYT wrote a very nice piece on me and my work on ‘China’s Growing Sands for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ran a gallery of 18 images to go with it. I’m really happy that the work has found this online platform and will reach out to so many people. Click on the image above to take you to the article.

bit.yl

It’s hard to know how much ‘reach’ work gets when it is published online. Of course I use things such as Google Analytics to track hits to my website and blog, but how do you track social networks passing on links about your work? Well, one of the tools I use is this website bit.yl This site allows you to shorten your links into handier bite-size lengths, then track them, in terms of numbers of clicks. Using this, I know that just through Twitter the link was viewed over 300 times. A modest amount, but that is another 300 people viewing the work, on top of those through Pulitzer, my blog, you tube etc. etc. over the past few months.

Socialdocumentary.net

Also this week, the website Socialdocumentray.net published a series of my pictures on the story of homeless communties in Mongolia. This body of work is in the pool of entries for the “Crisis and Opportunity: Documenting the Global Recession’ Competition. If you like the story, please help spread the word and awareness of this issue.

BritCham

I have been invited to speak at the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, on January 14th 2010, speaking about my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on ‘China’s Growing Sands’. If you are in town on the date, please come along! This is a rescheduled event from last year, so hopefully this will give more people a chance to come along and see images from my work covering desertification. All the details of the event can be found below. Hope to see you there!

Event Name – Speakers’ Corner: China’s Growing Sands

Speaker(s) – Sean Gallagher, Photographer

Date and Time – Thursday 14th January 2010, 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Venue – Mesa & Manifesto, 748 Julu Lu, near Fu Min Lu,T: 6289 9108

Cost – Member: RMB 120, Non-member: RMB 150

Payment Method – Pay at the event

Contact Details – events@sha.britcham.org / +86 (21) 6218 5022

BritCham Shanghai

Speakers’ Corner

China’s Growing Sands

Guest speaker: Sean Gallagher

Join us at this month’s Speakers’ Corner where award winning photographer Sean Gallagher will be showcasing his latest work “China’s Growing Sands”, a project highlighting desertification in China sponsored by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Desertification (the gradual transformation of habitable farmable land to desert) together with drought is estimated to cause approximately 42 billion USD in loss of food production each year worldwide and affects over 400 million people in China alone.  With just under 20% of China’s total land mass classified as desert, desertification in China is arguably one of China’s most pressing but under reported environmental concerns.  At this event Sean will talk about his journey on the ‘desertification train’ travelling 4000km from Beijing through China¡¯s major northern deserts to Xinjiang, reporting on the growing crisis and its effects on the people and cultures living in affected areas.

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.

China’s Growing Sands appears in the August issue of The Beijinger this month. For the foreign community in Beijing, the magazine needs no introduction as it is a well-known steady source of news, events and happenings in and around the Beijing area.

I’ve put the layout into a handy piece of software which allows you to flip through the layout, exactly as it appears in the magazine. To turn the pages above, just move your cursor to either the top-right of the right hand page or the bottom-right of it. Then, click and drag left. Also, if you want to try and read the text, or have a closer look at the pictures, just give the picture a double-click wherever you want to zoom into.

If the writing is top small for you to read, here is the reproduced text below:

China’s Growing Sands: A nation’s battle against desertification. Text and Photos by Sean Gallagher

China’s task to control it’s growing sands has reached near-incomprehensible proportions. It is estimated that 20 percent of China’s land area, some 1.74 million square kilometers, is now classified as desert. Affecting the lives of an estimated 400 million people, it is the most important environmental issue in China today and arguably the most under-reported. Earlier this year, I was awarded a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, enabling be to travel 4000km overland from Beijing to Xinjiang, to document the various issues associated with desertification impacting China.

So what is desertification? It refers to the gradual transformation of arable and/or habitable land into desert, usually caused by local and global climate change and more recently, fuelled by the mis-use of water and inappropriate agricultural methods.

For residents of Beijing, the most tangible example of the effects of desertification comes in the form of sandstorms, which occasionally descend on the capital in spring. Those deposits of sand and dust are more of an inconvenience than anything else, but the underlying causes have huge implications in China and across the world.

The first stop on my journey across the country was the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. “The dryness affects our lives a lot. We call it the ‘black disaster’, which means there is no grass – we are afraid of this”, recounted Zamusu, a farmer who has lived on the central grasslands of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous region all his life. The grasslands are suffering as a result of overgrazing leading to the deterioration of the grasslands.

In neighbouring Ningxia, China’s poorest and least visited province, sandstorms batter the land with a fiercer intensity than seen in Beijing. Here, in the northern central desert regions of the country, sand and degraded topsoil are picked up and launched into the air. As they move east, the sandstorms descend on Beijing, and in recent years, these same sandstorms have been carried on to South Korea, Japan and even as far as the west coast of the United States.

One of my journal entries reads: “You can smell a sandstorm. As I woke this morning, my throat was drier than normal and the smell of dust and sand had crept into my room whilst I was sleeping.” Wiping sand from my eyes, clothes and camera equipment constantly, I found the working conditions to be some of the hardest I have photographed in.

“In March, the winds start to blow”, sighed Mrs Ma, who owns a small Muslim restaurant in the centre of Hongsibao in Ningxia province. The town was built 10 years ago to house 200,000 ‘environmental refugees’, relocated from the dry mountainous regions of the province. The creation of the town is a positive example of how desertification is being tackled – but while people can be moved, the dry and ravaged area remains.

Reforestation projects are underway in an attempt to restabilze affected land. The Great Green Wall, a project to reforest thousands of kilometers of land to the north of Beijing, has met with some level of success in stabilizing soil, and the intensity of seasonal sandstorms in the capital has decreased in the past few years. At Turpan Desert Botanical Garden and Shapotou Desert Research Centre, scientists are studying which plant species work best to “fix” sands and return land to a level of productivity.

Drought in the north of the country and the misuse of the remaining water is one of the main factors contributing to desertification in China. “When I was young it was very poor in Minqin and it was dry too”, began Mr Fang, a watermelon farmer who lives near the Minqin Oasis. Sandwiched unforgivingly between the mighty Tengger desert and the equally menacing Badain Jaran desert the oasis’s surface water dried up a long time ago. The area has become a symbol for China’s disappearing water.  Fuelled by a 15 metre drop in the water table over the past 50 years, 50 percent of the area has now turned to desert. “Our lives are much better now, but the problem is we are short of underground water. People dig too many wells to get water to use on their fields”, laments Mr Fang.

Historical lessons from the inability to manage water resources can be learnt by looking west in the country to the old silk road, which once snaked through Xinjiang Uyger Autonomous Region. It is estimated that in the past 2000 years, nearly 40 cities have been abandoned as a result of desertification in Northwest China. Among them is the old city of Yinpan, in Xinjiang. I traveled to one of the harshest, most remote areas of China too see what remained of Yinpan.

Approximately 2000 years ago, the city of Yinpan was a successful, thriving and eclectic city, welcoming travelers from across Asia. The gradual disappearance of water in the region and the inability of the people to adapt to this change, led to the misuse – and ultimately, the complete disappearance – of the area’s water. Now, the city lies abandoned. Isolated from the world by its unforgiving location, the land is scattered with human remains, a result of wind and water erosion that are slowly wiping away what is left of this ancient city.

How China handles the threat from desertification over the coming decades, may prove to be a lesson for the global community. China has all the problems and challenges associated with the issue and at the same time, has all the resources at its disposal to potentially combat the problem. Whether it will effectively do so remains to be seen. Demands and pressures from other sources, both environmental and political, are pulling much needed attention from this issue. With millions of people being affected by this crisis, however, it’s a fight that China desperately needs to win.

Photo Blog Awards 2009 Logo

If the answer is yes, then please take a moment to visit the PhotoBlog Awards 2009 website here, where you can vote for this blog. Once through to the PhotoBlog Awards site just go to the ‘vote’ icon in the top-left corner next to the name of the blog, click and then register on the website. Your vote will then be registered. I’ve also included a link on the right of the blog, which will take you straight there.

Thanks as always for the support!

Please click here to listen to the panel discussion as it aired yesterday

Also, please find below a few images taken during the show by the host Chris Gelken and other members of the China Radio International staff.

[nggallery id=2]

]]> http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2009/07/31/panel-discussion-about-desertification-on-china-radio-international/feed/ 2 http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2009/07/28/interview-with-china-radio-international/ http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/2009/07/28/interview-with-china-radio-international/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:55:08 +0000 Sean Gallagher http://gallagher-photo.com/blog/?p=606 Please click here to listen to China Radio International Interview with photographer Sean Gallagher

The above audio file is an interview that aired with China Radio International today, on the subject of desertification and my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

This is the first time I have been interviewed on the radio in relation to my work for Pulitzer, however it won’t be the last as I have also been invited back for a panel discussion on Thursday 30th July which will air at 10:00 a.m. Beijing time (03:00 a.m. GMT), also on the subject of desertification. To hear that discussion, please tune in here. If you miss it, do not worry, as I shall post it onto the blog soon after.

Hope you enjoy the interview!

Exhibition Review of China's Growing Sands on Beijing City Weekend Website

Just wanted to let you know about a nice little review that has been written about my China’s Growing Sands exhibition which is still on show at Cafe Zarah in Central Beijing at the moment. It appears City Weekend’s Art Critic “Art Attack” caught the show and had some nice things to say about it. See the article here or read the reproduced text below.

The Art of Cafe Exhibits

Cafes and photography are usually a tepid mix. For reasons unknown most of the prints hanging on the walls of your local coffeehouse are blander than tea without sugar. But Cafe Zarah has pulled off a consistently interesting string of photography exhibits and the latest, China’s Growing Sandsby photojournalist Sean Gallagher, is no exception. After receiving a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Gallagher hit the road, covering over 4,000km of Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang provinces, training his lens on China’s struggle with desertification. The result is a series of carefully selected shots that form a thoughtful portrait of of the country’s battle with encroaching dunes and dust. From a woman huddled outside a yurt surrounded by desert to a child standing in a sand pit in a city built entirely on the stuff, each individual photo thoughtfully speaks to the larger issue. Well worth it to chill with a coffee and have a look. To Aug. 5.