Gallery: China 2004-01

China - Summer 2004

During the summer, I went on a four week fieldtrip to Shanghai and Peking, China. The purpose of the trip was to expand my knowledge of mainland Asia, especially regarding disability and social welfare issues. In reality, four weeks is a very short time for an anthropologist to become acclimated to a location and I viewed this as a preliminary field research trip, with more in the future. Although I'll only talk about photography here, there was also a lot of anthropological field research going on behind the scenes that I will not talk about. Basically, I spent most of the days in seminars at various universities, and these photographs were taken in the "off-time."

I'm gradually scanning in my film from the trip and photos will be posted to this gallery as I go along.

This first series on this page is from the "Old Town" area of Shanghai.

Shanhai is China's largest and most modern city, and may even be the largest metropolitan area in the world (depending on how you count city boundaries), but you can't tell that from some of the neighborhoods. Although its tempting to think that because this is the Old Town part of Shanghai that these shanty areas represent the "old Shanghai", it's also important to remember that capitalism has brought immense poverty to China, just as well as immense wealth. Just a few blocks away from these street vendors was a major thoroughfare where tinted BMWs drove through.