Steve Barru Photographs

This boy was attending a rock music festival – cannot recall the name of the event – for a number of years an annual music show in Beijing during the May Day holiday. Local and foreign bands, though no big name acts. I went for the photos, the music was mostly noisy and beyond an old timer like me. This festival is long gone. Too many bad elements and bad ideas, and definitely too much fun for the humorless old gangsters that run the country to tolerate.

I recently bought still another 4TB external hard drive – they get cheaper all the time – and backed up photos on yet another hard drive. I got to rummaging through some of the pictures from the final years I lived in Beijing. A wound-up, high-stress, absurdly polluted place you loved to hate, and yet… Despite all of the hideous development at the hands of the soulless creatures that run the city, still a charming, beautiful city in its own way, a world city in every respect. I was there from 2005 to 2012 and throughout those years, it was definitely a wonderful place to set out walking with a camera.