Back at last with a news flash

August 1, 2010 9:33 AM

This website has been paralyzed, very frustratingly, for the last few months, which have been a period of unusual richness for me in terms of projects, personal experiences, and new adventures.
The first month of the summer was spent in Myanmar (Burma), where I taught a series of workshops for local photojournalists. It was my first trip to Burma, and the experience of photographing there intensively, day after day, was extraordinarily fulfilling.
I’ve put some of my color work from the trip on Glimpse Click to see images, my companion website, but my most serious work was done in medium format using black and white film, and although I’ve recently developed that material and eyeballed the negatives, I won’t be able to show it until I get back to New York in a few weeks, and scan it all properly. Stay tuned. The Mamiya 7 that I bought expressly for this project was a real dream to work with.
Since mid-June, I’ve been back in Shanghai busying myself in a number of other ways: teaching a summer course on China (with CIEE) at East China Normall University that’s derived from my Columbia J-School China Seminar; photographing the city in snatches toward a variety of ends, one of which is a collaborative book project with a well-known Chinese author, about which I’ll hopefully have a lot more to say soon. Another mini-project has consisted of portrait a single city block in one Shanghai’s few surviving old neighborhoods. Throughout the summer, I’ve returned to this particular place , which I had somehow never photographed seriously before, dozens of times. I’m excited about making prints in the fall.
I’ve also photographed more nudes in studio in Shanghai this summer, continuing the work in this vein that I began here a couple of years ago Click to see the images , and pushing hard to developing my style further. I’ll be updating the gallery seen at the link above of this work in September
As I write, I am visiting Dali, in southern Yunnan Province, as a solo exhibitor at the Second Annual Dali International Photography Festival Click to read more. For this event, I was asked to exhibit some of my personal work to date, images that represent a real departure from what I usually do: pastoral landscapes from the Virginia Piedmont area where my family is from Click to see Echo Valley. This is the second big Chinese photography festival my work has been featured in, the first being a solo exhibition of Disappearing Shanghai at the Lianzhou International Photography Festival in 2008. Click to see NYT’s Lens Blog on Disappearing Shanghai
This summer, I’ve also been reporting three magazine articles, all due soon, on Burma, on Japan and on China.
After a very productive two years of magazine writing and other journalism, I expect this to be my last big fling with freelance work for a while, because of what is perhaps the biggest news of the summer, the receipt of a generous fellowship from the Open Society Institute Click to read more to research a book on Chinese migration to Africa, which I will begin working on in earnest in September 2010.

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Featured Writing

Barriers fall as a society changes; Letter from China

August 31, 2010 8:58 PM

BY HOWARD W. FRENCH
999 words
31 August 2010

© 2010 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

The rush hour crush had just subsided on a stifling recent summer evening, when I stepped into the subway car on the circular line that serves the central city as part of the brilliant public transportation system Shanghai has built in what seems like no time at all.

Hot and bothered from hours of photographing on the street, I was relieved to find an empty seat by the door and promptly collapsed into it, savoring the refreshing gusts of air-conditioning.

A moment passed before I looked up and paid any attention to the other passengers. As the lone foreigner usually in situations like these, I had become accustomed during my summer stay in the city to finding all eyes focused on me. This time, though, commuters had something further out of the bounds of their daily commute to focus on.

Seated directly opposite me, two teenage girls were kissing in an unmistakably romantic way. They appeared to be no older than 17. One of them, strong of build and with short hair, was dressed and coiffed in a masculine style. Her longhaired companion, who was dressed in a pretty pastel skirt, was the picture of classic, old-school sweet 16.

I tried to do what I immediately noted few of my fellow passengers could accomplish: not stare. But as I looked up from time to time, it struck me that among other things, amid all of the sustained touching, billing and cooing, there was willful, if mild, provocation taking place before my eyes.

The statement that was being made seemed to say: ‘‘This is a new age, and people of our generation are free to do as we wish in our love lives, so get over it.’’

It has become a truism to observe that contemporary China is the scene of the most rapid, transformative change of any large country in the world today. Usually, discussion focuses on industry and trade, or on China’s conquest of new markets in faraway regions, or perhaps most common of all, on the breathtaking roll-out of infrastructure, like the subway I was riding on, which puts its ancient forerunner in New York, where I live, to shame.

The scene unfolding before me was a jolting reminder that the nuts and bolts transformation of China is the least of it. As this society rapidly grows richer, its social fabric and mores have been changing in ways far more dramatic than even the physical landscape, and sexual choice and expression are arguably in the leading edge of this upheaval.

Places like Shanghai, an island of particular affluence, provide a privileged bird’s-eye view of the changes under way. When I lived here between 2003 and 2008, the public emergence of gay men became an increasingly evident fact of daily life. For the most part, at least as far as an anecdotal sense of things could confirm, though, open same-sex relationships among females here lagged far behind.

Returning to Shanghai each summer since then has sharpened my awareness of incremental social change. Last year, I noticed apparently lesbian couples for the first time, in any substantial number. I have vivid memories, in particular, of dinner one night in a favorite restaurant, where two nearby women in their late 20s and dressed as professionals engaged in ever more passionate embraces.

There were other scenes observed like this that I tucked away and made little of until I returned in June and immediately began encountering examples of public intimacy between women. I also began noticing the far greater prevalence of what I’ve thought of as masculine styling by women, which Chinese friends say parallels the emergence of what they call a unisex style that has become very popular among young men.

Had something big changed here in such a short period of time? ‘‘During the recent 10 years we have seen the opening up of many previously forbidden or repressed voices around sexuality, and homosexuality is one of them,’’ said Lucetta Kam, an associate professor at Shantou University, who specializes in gender studies. As causes she cited the influence of the Internet, which ‘‘has given rise to social networking of people with similar experiences, aspirations and thinking.’’

Ms. Kam also cited the easing of ‘‘ideological restrictions,’’ which tracks the rapid decline of ideology in most every aspect of Chinese life. Most interestingly for me, though, she mentioned the ‘‘sudden media exposure of lesbian and gay people’’ in prime-time television in China.

According to Feng Hui, an 18-year-old student and self-described lesbian whom I met at a shopping mall, a critical breakthrough occurred in 2005 with the victory of Li Yuchun, the 21-year-old winner of China’s ‘‘Super Girl’’ contest, a discontinued ‘‘American Idol’’-like talent show. Throughout Ms. Li, who has sidestepped questions about her sexuality, wore her hair short and dressed in boyish fashions. Moreover, she won singing love songs written for men about women.

‘‘Super Girl’’ had more than 400 million viewers, and its balloting has been called the largest voting exercise ever conducted in China. After Ms. Li’s victory, the authorities denounced the show as vulgar, but she has gone on to prominent roles in advertising and cinema here, and has stuck to her style.

‘‘Li Yuchun is the mother of unisex in China, and her comfort with herself inspired a whole generation of women like me,’’ said Ms. Feng.

Another researcher on sexuality here, Zhu Jianfeng, of Fudan University, was more reserved about the role of Li Yuchun but agreed that things were changing fast. ‘‘The society has become much more accepting than in the past, and fewer people will challenge you and ask, ‘How could you live that way?’’’

The last barrier remains the family, she said. ‘‘People can be open about their sexuality with their friends, but within the family, it is still uncommon.’’

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New BBC Feature on ‘Disappearing Shanghai’

July 14, 2009 12:53 AM

The BBC has just posted a slide show feature on my Disappearing Shanghai book project on its website.

Click here to see the BBC slide show

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Flickriver

May 26, 2009 12:23 PM

I’m off to China soon, where I’m pushing to complete work on my Disappearing Shanghai photography project, which I hope to publish in book form in the coming year. I’ve been working hard on this, re-scanning hundreds of 6x6 negatives on a rented Imacon (expensive!).

There will be a rather different emphasis with this summer’s photography proper, with a focus on intimate interiors in both the old neighborhoods I’ve haunted for the last five years and in the newly built neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, where tens of thousands of people have been relocated.

I’ll be updating my website Click here to see it quite a bit over the weeks ahead. I’d also encourage people interested in my work to visit my Flickr stream. A good way to do so is through the link below:

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John Updike - A remembrance

January 28, 2009 12:15 AM

I never met John Updike, except in print.
In the February 5, 1996 editions of The New Yorker, he wrote this of my work:

“Last summer the dying Congolese novelist, playwright and poet told the Times correspondent, Howard French, “Africa is the only continent left that has not found its way. We have this incredible wealth, of resources and spirit, but outsiders like France are just robbing us, while blessing our dictators.”

Tansi made this statement in the remote village of Foufoundou, in his native African state of Congo, where he had found remission from the symptoms of aids by way of mixture of herbal medicines and incantations that mixed “African traditional healing and Christian evangelism.” Tansi told his interviewer, “I had been to hospitals in Brazzaville and Paris, but they had been unable to do anything for me. It wasn’t until I came here, following the voice of a prophet that my condition really began to change. I should have come long ago.” But his native herbal concoctions had not helped Tansi’s wife, Pierrette, who, lying emaciated and feeble on a mat, claimed they had made her mouth so sore that she could eat nothing but oranges. Two weeks later, both she and Tansi were dead.”

He was 47 and widely considered the leading writer of Central Africa. His miserable end betokens the misery of Africa, a continent beset by AIDS, famine, poverty, corruption, tyranny and genocidal massacre…” (the article continues at some length.)

There was an honor, naturally, in having one’s work mentioned by Updike. But there was something more, too, an odd coming together in this experience of two of the writers on Africa whose fiction had most affected me: Updike and Tansi. More about Tansi can be found on this site. As for Updike, his novel, The Coup, is not particularly well appreciated, but its a jewel of perception, of wicked humor and of observation — both of an imagined Africa, if that’s possible, and of the United States, whose provincialism, tawdriness and vacuous commercialism, the author lampoons without mercy.

Both of the offerings below come most highly recommended.

Link

Link

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Echo Valley

January 11, 2009 7:54 PM

I’ve created a new gallery in my photography website by the name of Echo Valley consisting of photographs from my “lao jia,” my homeland, in the deepest sense of the word, in north-central Virginia. There’s an accompanying essay in the “News” section of the website. Please enjoy.

Click to visit the gallery

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