I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
A gentle observer of a nation undergoing transformation. Riboud witnessed a wide range of people from the top leaders mingling with Western diplomats to steelworkers, farmers, and students. At a time when most foreign visitor's access was highly restricted and choreographed scenes of socialist paradise were the norm he somehow managed to capture the energy and spontaneity of his subjects. By singling out individuals who were not reacting to his presence he allows their dignity to shine through. His compositions invariably elegant and technically beyond reproach nevertheless are full of life, particularly his earlier work.
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
Spontaneous photojournalism has not been a feature of the People’s Republic as the state-run media prefers rigid control of any media message. One of the most distinguished early practitioners of documentary photography to challenge this dull approach was Wang Fuchun. His book on life on the long-distance trains that trundled across the country delighted and informed first his compatriots and then the world. Most of the journeys he witnessed were in the age before mass tourism and are a far cry from the world-beating high-speed trains of the 21st century. It feels like ancient history but steam-powered locomotives were still produced in China until the 1990s, the last country to give up the coal-burning dinosaurs.
China's economy has developed rapidly for 40 years. Railway is the artery of this land and is also a mirror for the rise of the Chinese economy. As a railway worker, the photographer Wang Fuchun takes pictures for people on the train to record the feelings and emotions in the narrow space on the train with almost instinctive observation and reflection. He expands the carriage of transportation vehicles to the stage of life, the space of flowing history, the platform for social contact, the happy theater and the mobile caravan. It is accumulated as time goes by and condenses life…
Peeking over the American fence, I found myself in China in 2004 as the nation was transitioning from its quaint 1980s/90s self into the futuristic “China 2.0” we know it today. My occupation, like many expats, was small-town English teacher. I later departed for a two-year backpacking sojourn across the country. I took a bunch of snapshots along the way with a little point-and-shoot camera. 800 of those images became my first book. Photography – be it travel, documentary, street or reportage – is my passion. The following are but five of five hundred books I’d love to recommend.
Prior to her death in 2015, photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark had published over 20 collections of her work spanning her storied career, but few hit the reader in the gut like her debut Falkland Road. Taken during visits to Mumbai (Bombay) in the 1970s, Mary was able to gain the trust of sex workers being pimped out in the Indian city’s notorious red-light district. The images are dark, disturbing, and bleak, but their intimacy and tenderness are what separates Mary from her peers.
Mark's extended photo essay on the prostitution district of Bombay is one of the landmarks of color photojournalism. Small half-inch tear at base of spine. Slight scuffing and fading to cover. Interior and photographs are clean and unmarked.
I’m a sociologist who has just written a book about the ways that we engage with death and dying online, and before that I wrote a book about media coverage of disasters. Macabre subjects have always fascinated me, I guess, not because they are macabre but because they reveal a great deal about the ways we live and our sense of the value of life itself.
This book is not about death on its own but images of death, and the roles to which they are put by the press and politicians.
Focusing on iconic photographs of death from events such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th attacks, among many others, Zelizer charts a growing discomfort over time with images of death in the news. As technology improved, such photos became more graphic and intimate, and norms around the increasingly professionalized field of journalism came to render them mostly off limits.
Despite the general squeamishness of Western journalists and readers towards such images today, however, we do still see them during major world events and important breaking stories. It’s also true, Zelizer points out, that images of death in far away places are often shown in American newspapers with less concern.
Due to its ability to freeze a moment in time, the photo is a uniquely powerful device for ordering and understanding the world. But when an image depicts complex, ambiguous, or controversial events--terrorist attacks, wars, political assassinations--its ability to influence perception can prove deeply unsettling. Are we really seeing the world "as it is" or is the image a fabrication or projection? How do a photo's content and form shape a viewer's impressions? What do such images contribute to historical memory? About to Die focuses on one emotionally charged category of news photograph--depictions of individuals who are facing imminent death--as…
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
After the gradual normalisation of relations between China and the US and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, a small number of western journalists were allowed to open bureaus in Beijing. Access was limited and travel difficult but one talented Chinese American photojournalist really pushed the boundaries in showing the rest of the world what the long inaccessible country was like. His tenacity and eye for the telling detail were an inspiration for me to take up the challenge to devote my career to covering the historic era of change in due course. Such was Liu’s ability to cover more than his hosts were quite ready to show ethnic Chinese foreign journalists found it near impossible to gain accreditation for many years afterwards.
An entire country captures unposed and authentic in a unique collection of photographs. China is seen emerging from a frightening period of political terror into an era where its true nature can be expressed once again. In decades to come, we and those who follow us will need to look back on post-Maoist China and try to understand what was the experience then of the nearly one-quarter of humanity that is Chinese. It will, I predict, be the images in this collection by Lin Heung Shing that, more than any other single source, will most deeply touch our understanding
My name is Cecilia Ruiz and I am a Mexican author and illustrator living in Brooklyn. Apart from desperately trying to make more books, I teach design and illustration at Queens College and the School of Visual Arts. I’m fascinated by visual storytelling and its evocative power. One of my idols, the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, says that art lies in suggestion. Bresson believed that things should be shown from one single angle that evokes all the other angles without showing them.All the books in this list do that—they show us death but they make us think about the mysterious and poetic ways in which life operates.
The photographs compiled in this book were all captured by Enrique Metinides, my favorite Mexican photographer.
Enrique worked as a crime photographer for over 50 years, capturing murders, crashes, and all kinds of catastrophes for Mexico’s infamous tabloids. This photo book is a great testament of Mexico’s palpable surrealism, where death is just one more component of the chaotic landscape.
Even though Metinides worked for the sensationalist press, none of the images in this book could be called that. His photos emanate an enormous respect for the victims and for tragedy itself.
The beauty of his shots do not romanticize the “real-life horror” that we are looking at. Rather, they remind us that sometimes, when in the presence of the devastating forces of life, there’s nothing else to do but be a humble spectator.
In my “day job” I write about architecture, which means I often write about things I see in photos. When I began writing fiction, I continued using photos as inspiration and research. My novels are inspired by my family’s circumstances at the end of World War II and my fascination with the work of the Monuments Men. Photos show me details like a little girl playing with her doll under a sign that declares her building to be at risk of collapse, or a woman using the ruins of a building to hang out the wash. I love finding ways to use these elements in my writing.
Technically about World War II, this work covers Chim’s work depicting culture, politics, and life before and after the war, so the circumstances leading to conflict and its aftermath. Chim was the co-founder of Magnum Photos, so his contribution to photojournalism is immense, and his photos are beautifully lit and composed even as they capture fleeting moments: Polish school children waiting for a bus in the rain, a baby reaching for bread at a displaced person’s camp or a boy playing in the ruins of a bombed building. The book also includes later photos of celebrities and movie stars, which, when seen alongside his earlier work creates an interesting narrative of a world putting itself back together and once again seeking out joy and beauty.
Born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Chim began his career in the early 1930s photographing for leftist magazines in Paris. In 1936, one of these magazines, Regards, sent him to the frontlines of the civil war in Spain, along with comrades Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Although war formed the backdrop of much of his reportage, Chim was an astute observer of twentieth-century European politics, social life, and culture, from the beginnings of the antifascist struggle to the rebuilding of countries ravaged by World War II. Like millions of other Europeans, Chim had suffered the pain of dislocation and the loss…
I’ve always had a soft spot for books on sisterhood. Perhaps it’s because I have a sister, but it’s partly because I’ve also lucked out on wonderful girlfriends who’ve taken the role of sisters at various stages of my life. There is an immense power in female relationships, and it’s a theme I often explore through my writing. Both my novels, The Marriage Clock and The Retreat center around strong women who consistently and generously show up for each other. I’ve compiled a list of books to celebrate the many sisters in our lives—through blood and friendship. I hope you find them as enjoyable to read as I have!
My husband is a native Bostonian, so when I discovered this novel takes place in the historic Back Bay neighborhood of the city, I was immediately intrigued.
The story follows Meena Dave, an orphan who has inherited an apartment from a woman she has never met. As she attempts to figure out their connection, she forms an unexpected friendship with a trio of meddling aunties who also live in the building and have been in each other’s lives since birth.
Through these women, Meena learns not just of her past, but of the importance of community, culture, and the sacrifices of sisterhood.
A woman embarks on an unexpected journey into her past in an engrossing novel about identity, family secrets, and rediscovering the need to belong.
Meena Dave is a photojournalist and a nomad. She has no family, no permanent address, and no long-term attachments, preferring to observe the world at a distance through the lens of her camera. But Meena's solitary life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly inherits an apartment in a Victorian brownstone in historic Back Bay, Boston.
Though Meena's impulse is to sell it and keep moving, she decides to use her journalistic instinct to follow the…
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
This vast book in 500 pages broke new ground in publishing and photojournalism circles in China. Edited by the visionary curator Wang Huangsheng this extraordinary collection of colour and black and white material from hundreds of photographers both professional and amateur remains unmatched in scope. With unflinching courage to show both the brightest and darkest sides of life in the People’s Republic Wang selected many previously unpublished images along a range of themes from ‘desire’ to ‘time’, existence’ to ’relationships’. Crime and punishment, rural schools, and worker demonstrations - all sorts of subjects that were rarely seen in the state media, even the anal inspection of army recruits. Never before and rarely since, particularly in the last few years, has such a daring serving of so many slices of life been served. This important book is a reminder that despite the limitations of China’s state media and the much denigrated…
Humanism in China A Contemporary Record of Photography
Themed "Humanized China - Individualized China", the exhibition "Humanism in China" derives from the following three ideas. First,to record in detail the daily lives of ordinary Chinese in different periods of time; Second, to display the diversity of Chinese people's lives from all walks of life;Third, to promote the humanistic spirit of contemporary Chinese candid photography.
The exhibition is divided into four subjects: Existence, Relationship, Desire and Time. "Existence" reveals the contemporary Chinese people's everyday existence. "Relationship" presents the complexities and nature of relationships among nature, mankind and social environment. "Desire" stresses…
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
The grandmaster of 20th Century photojournalism long had a fascination with China and was fortunate to get access to the country both pre and post-revolution. These times were chaotic and characterised by social upheaval yet Cartier-Bresson finds order and meaning through close observation and attention to geometric form until the ‘decisive moment’ is reached. Civil war, political turbulence, and an undercurrent of violence were the prevailing themes of this period yet the Frenchman’s sensitivity to the humanity and strength of his subjects is what lingers in the mind long after closing the cover.
