working in china
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Monday, March 1st, 2010
Cadres | Beijing | China | 2007
This week’s ‘Photo of the Week’ was a shot taken as part of the ‘One Night in Beijing’ shoot for the Immersion Guides to Beijing in 2007. Exactly one year before the beginning of the Olympic Games in Beijing, photographers all across the capital were commissioned to head out onto the streets to capture images that represented the city at night.
It was an interesting shoot and the result was a very nice book which showed off many of the eclectic pictures captured from that night. The above picture from a club in the city didn’t actually make the final edit but I always liked it due to the intense colours and the contrast between the Long March Cadres on the wall and the revellers dancing.
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Tags: asia, beijing, china, on assignment, one night in beijing, photo of the week, photographing people, photography, working in china
Friday, February 26th, 2010
The Guardian Newspaper | UK
With today’s post, I wanted to give readers an insight into the day-today shooting of a pro-photographer. I’ll be talking about something that is a key skill for working photographers, especially those who work on-assignment usually to tight or restrictive deadlines. When you are working as a photographer, it is of paramount importance that when you are assigned to a job, you ‘get the shot’ that your client wants.
Most editors/clients have little patience for excuses such as ‘the light wasn’t good’, ‘i didn’t have the right lense’, ‘the atmosphere wasn’t right for a picture’ etc. These are poor excuses and a client hires you because they expect you to overcome these obstacles and get the picture, because it’s your job to deliver.
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Tags: asia, beijing, china, on assignment, photographing people, photography, portraits, the age, the guardian, working in china
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Heat of the Moment
Over at the Pulitzer Gateway, I am now taking questions from students in the US about the effects of desertification in China and how I reported on the subject last year. As part of the Pulitzer Center’s efforts to break down the barriers between reporters and their readers, they have provided a great venue for people to log-on, view the reporting and then ask the written journalists/videographers/photographers how and why they reported these issues.
As well as my work on desertification in China, there are many other fascinating stories on diverse subjects such as ‘flooding and drought in Mozambique’, ‘climate refugees in the south Pacific’, ‘water issues in Ethiopia’ and reports from COP15 by Pulitzer journalists. Spend some time there and find out about some of the ways we are all being affected by climate change.
Student Questions
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Tags: asia, china, china's growing sands, desertification, education, pulitzer center on crisis reporting, the environment, websites, working in china
Monday, January 11th, 2010
I was asked recently by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to answer some questions with regards to my reporting on the subject of desertification in China. This is part of their initiative titled ‘Meet the Journalist”, offering viewers a chance to get ‘behind the scenes’ and find out some of the motivations and working practices that go into the reporting by the grantees. I was happy to answer a few questions on my reporting, all of which can be found now on the Pultizer Center’s YouTube channel, which is well worth checking out.
The first of the videos can be found below.
Question 1 “Why did you decide to report on this issue?”
Please head here to view answers to the following questions: What was your biggest hurdle reporting on this issue? How is this story related to issues in the US? How has climate change news coverage evolved since you started reporting on these issues, and what could be done better?
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Tags: asia, china, china's growing sands, desertification, interviews, on assignment, photographing people, photography, pulitzer center on crisis reporting, the environment, the internet, video, working in china, you tube
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Phoenix Weekly - Hong Kong
One of my biggest challenges working in China over the past few years has been making inroads into the Chinese press. Notorious for the control that is placed upon the industry by the state, it is hard for foreign reporters to contemplate working under such restrictions that see their work scrutinized so closely and possibly edited accordingly.
Phoenix Weekly - Hong Kong
Recently, I have started to have more and more work appear in the Chinese press, with relatively little interference. By far the most popular story for garnering interest from the Chinese press has been my work on the issue of desertification in China. Many editors and reporters who have contacted me seem fascinated that a non-Chinese that is reporting this issue, providing a new and fresh visual representation of the issue. Surprisingly also is that many editors have been in contact with me state that the fact they know I have been in China for a number of years, adds to the ‘credibility’ of my work and makes them trust me and it more.
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Tags: asia, beijing, china, china's growing sands, city construction, desertification, phoenix weekly, photography, published work, pulitzer center on crisis reporting, the environment, working in china
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
My Image on the front page of Canada's national newspaper yesterday.
I got a surprise yesterday evening when I got a text from a colleague telling me that one of my photos had run on the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been contributing the visuals from China quite a lot to the Globe and Mail recently. They are a great team to work with and I was delighted to see that they had decided to run my photo of Mao Zedong’s personal photographer Hou Bo, taken at her home in Beijing, as part of the coverage of China’s 60th birthday.
If you missed my last post about this assignment and meeting this remarkable photographer, please head here to read it.
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Tags: beijing, china, newspaper, on assignment, photographing people, photography, portraits, published work, the globe and mail, working in china
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Hangzhou. Flags fly in the city. 2009
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Here in Beijing, Tiananmen Square has become awash with parades, both military and civilian, as the populace celebrates Mao Zedong’s founding declaration, exactly 60 years ago here in China’s capital.
The build up to this event has been quite something. Beijing has come to a standstill at regular intervals over the past couple of weeks as dry-runs of today’s celebrations have taken place. Tanks have once again graced the streets of Beijing, fighter jets have zipped above the city and and army of yellow-shirted volunteers have descended on every street corner throughout the city.
In the build-up to this anniversary, I have been on assignment for Canada’s Globe and Mail, covering various facets of the country’s preparations and photographing various people who have a close connection to what the country has gone through in the last 60 years.
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Tags: china, hangzhou, on assignment, photography, published work, the globe and mail, video, working in china, yu hua
Monday, September 28th, 2009
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.
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Tags: beijing, china, hutongs, magnum photos, photo of the week, photography, working in china
Friday, September 4th, 2009
'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 experience so far working as a photographer but last month, I had a very 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 too much. 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.
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Tags: beijing, china, crazy english, english in china, li yang, on assignment, photographing people, working in china
Friday, August 14th, 2009
Please find below, a selection of images from my exhibition opening this morning in the city hall of the the city of Wulanhaote, in Inner Mongolia as part of the International Conference of Science and Technology on Desertification Control (ICSTDC). The above image is the leading shot in the exhibition.
The opening was a great success this morning with guests to the conference taking in the exhibit before the main opening ceremony. Today consisted of opening lectures from various Chinese and International scientists. The topics were as diverse as the speakers with talks covering subjects such as the history of desertification in China, agricultural ways to combat desertification, urban desertification and alternative energy sources from the desert.
I speak tomorrow morning here at the conference, presenting my 2 years of work covering desertification in China in a presentation titled “Desertification in China: A Photographic Journey.” I shall hopefully upload images and audio tomorrow from my talk.
I hope you enjoy the images of my exhibition opening!
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Tags: china, china's growing sands, desertification, exhibitions, the environment, working in china
