Images from Zhengzhou Universities Talks

This weekend I travelled to the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a city of some 7 million people lying next to the Yellow River in central Henan province. I was in the city to give a series of talks at Universities in the city, presenting some of my work in China over the past 4 years and also introducing our workshops to the students of the city.

My presentation began with an introduction about myself, reasons for coming to China and a general overview of the types of subjects that I cover. I then introduced the main part of my presentation, about my work on desertification over the past three years. I structured the talk about desertification to take the audience across China, starting in Beijing in the east and then finishing in Xinjiang province in the west. Many of the students seemed surprised about the scale of desertification throughout the north of China.

After presenting my work about desertification, I introduced images of a number of images of Chinese celebrities that I have had the opportunity to photograph during my time in China. The highlight was definitely showing my photos of Ding Junhui, a snooker player of national fame here.

Towards the end of the talks we introduced our workshops in Beijing and announced the beginning of these workshops in Zhengzhou which will hopefully start during this summer/autumn.

At the end of the talks we opening up the floor to questions and I was surprised how many students were keen to ask questions. The questions were varied and included inquiries mainly about desertification and other environmental issues in China. Many students were also keen to ask questions about the aesthetics of photography and were looking for advice on how to get started in photography.

Our talks started on Friday evening and by Sunday evening we had completed 4 talks and spoken to over 1000 students. Not bad for a weekend’s work! Hope you enjoy the photos. Scroll down for a few more….