Visit to Dardo, July 2007
Dardo (the Tibetan name is also rendered Dartsedo or Darzêdo) is a city of about 100,000 people in the mountains halfway between Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, and the border of the Tibet Autonomous Region (so-called). In Chinese the city is called Kangding. Dardo is on the unofficial border between the Han Chinese and the Tibetan cultural areas of China. Wikipedia says the city's population is 40% Han, 40% Tibetan and 20% other minority nationalities. While the Chinese government claims otherwise, Dardo is a reminder that China is a multi-cultural territorial empire with the dominant Han majority and numerous minority nationalities uneasily sharing much of the western part of the empire's territory.
Strangers and Friends
I enjoy portraiture and have shot quite a few along of the way, of friends and others encountered more briefly. The most recent of these image are digital; the older ones are from slides or black and white film.
Market Day
I travelled with three friends through Mexico and Guatemala in the winter of 1971. This series of pictures is from an open air market in Guatemala City. The photos were shot on Kodak Tri X film using a Nikon Ftn camera and a Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens. I scanned the original negatives to create the images here.
Another Time, Beijing 1987-1989
I first came to Beijing in August of 1987 to study Chinese. In those days Beijing was a sprawling, low-rise city, a big city but still on a human scale compared to the monstrous mega-city it has become today. Having just arrived, I found everything about China new and often incomprehensible; I pointed my camera at anything and everything. I've chosen a dozen images almost at random, ones which, for me at least, do a bit to recapture some of the wonder I felt at being here during those early years. I was shooting Fujichrome 100 in a Nikon FM2 camera with either a 28mm f2.8 lens or a 50mm f1.4 lens.
Another Time, Nanjing 1990
In 1989 I moved to Nanjing, a city at that time of about 7 million located along the Yangtse River 275 km west of Shanghai. I studied there for a year; the academic program was a waste of time, but I fell in love with Nanjing. Finally, I did not leave the city until 2005 when I moved to Beijing. This series of photos was shot over several muggy, very hot days in July of 1990. I hope they capture at least some of the quiet beauty of Nanjing before it was overcome, like cities all over China, by rampant development and "progress" at any price. Again, Fujichrome 100 in a Nikon FM2 camera with either a 28mm f2.8 lens or a 50mm f1.4 lens.
Nanjing Then and Now
Chinese cities have undergone extraordinary transformations in recent years and Nanjing is no exception. The photo pairs in this gallery are shots of Nanjing locales taken from roughly the same spot. One image is from 1990, the other from 2006. For better or worse, the changes are remarkable.