We travel around the world in this week’s photography links, touching on culture, poverty, urbanization and daily life.

- New Yorker profiles Caroline Drake’s work on Central Asia with rather insightful captions. She has been photographing the region for a long time, delving layers into the region, transcending culture, ethnicity and politics. Her latest book “Two Rivers” follows the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the region’s major rivers.

- The Atlantic features how photographers are telling the story of China’s warp-speed urbanization at the San Jose Museum of Art. I was quite taken by Weng Fen‘s work. In his earlier series Sitting on the Wall and Bird’s Eye View, Weng’s images has young girls sitting/standing on a wall, bridge and platform staring out into the abyss of technicolor urbanism in cities such as Haikou, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

-  Photographer Russian Vlad Sokhin captures an under-reported plight of children in servitude called “Restavek: Child Slavery in Haiti” which I found very unsettling. Sokhin’s photos are disturbing without being graphic, but not as distressing as what he did not photograph:

“Sometimes he (Sokhin) was forced to put down his camera so he would not be participating in mistreatment, he said. In one photograph (Slide 20), a man who refused to have his identity revealed nonetheless slung his arm around the shirtless shoulders of his restavek boy while Mr. Sokhin was shooting. His head is cut off, a lit cigarette dangles from his hand, and the effect is creepy.

Even creepier, Mr. Sokhin said, was what he declined to photograph next: the man put the cigarette in the little boy’s mouth, laughing.”

The ethics of photographing such vulnerabe subjects are always murky to me, but I hope the ends justify the means. Writer Deborah Sontag wrote an extensive article about the plight of restaveks.

- Martin Parr’s saturated and trippy “USA Color” should perfectly lift your spirits.

As always, you can read more related links on the blog’s Facebook page.

One thing I promised myself with the blog’s revival is to share more as I’m hoping readers will evolve a little with me as we expand beyond Shanghai and China on occasion.

As part of the China in Central Asia project that I have been involved with, I am still publishing on the topic as interest remains strong. Come July, I’ll be having an exhibit on Kyrgyzstan in Singapore, details which I will share soon.

Inspired by the simplicity of monochrome and missing the general wanderlust feel of driving for hours on end from north to south and back again, experiencing evergreens to snowy mountains in span of weeks, I present a short series of being on the road in Kyrgyzstan.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Trapped in a bustling mall at the worst possible time – lunch, I was in line at a restaurant when I spotted Captain America riding the escalator. Kitted out from head to toe in a leather headgear, handsome blue jacket and jeans and of course, a red-white-and-blue shield - he strode confidently while examining his surroundings.

I watched him as he ambled around the cinema on the seventh floor of the shopping mall, obliging passers-by for photographs. There was no sign, no accompanying Avenger partners, nothing. Just him. Strolling.

It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I dashed over and waited patiently past eager children and giggling office girls. His face, half-covered, appeared handsome and strong. He posed strong-man style next to his younglings, staring off into the distance with a look that said, “Yes, I am here to protect and pose.”

When it was my turn, I shook my head when he shifted into yet another stance.

“I just want to know if you made this costume.” I asked.

Caught off-guard, he relaxed and nodded sheepishly. I replied, “That’s just awesome. What’s your name?”

It was the first time he appeared abashed. His Cosplay (costume play) name is “Little Bun” or xiaomantou (小馒头). The irony struck me as I tilted my head backwards to speak to his 6″2 frame. The movie Avengers was playing in the theatres then but he wasn’t paid to be walking advertisement. There was no need to given the glamorous lure of Hollywood and Marvel combined. Why are you here, if unpaid and simply posing for pictures in a random mall? I asked.

He shrugged, “I had time. Besides, this is fun.”

Little Bun was born and bred in Shanghai, and currently studying in university. He participated in Cosplay events, even performed in the annual ChinaJoy Cosplay Competition – where lusty men photographed endless half-naked young women in World of Warcraft costumes and Goth-dressed, pimply teenagers acted out their favorite Japanese anime novels.

I took down his number, much to the embarrassment of my colleague who commented that I was too old to be chatting up a young boy. Undeterred, I showed up per his instructions the next weekend in Jingan’s shopping mall, where he and his Cosplay friends were participating in an “American Heroes” exhibit. After that, he said, they had to practice for their play for the upcoming ChinaJoy.

Sure enough, on a hot and sweaty afternoon, I arrived to a smorgesboard of costume-clad teenagers in a copyright confusion/crossover from Marvel to Star Wars to DC Comics. Storm troopers posed with a Red Darth Vader, ambiguous interpretations of Spidermen and Supermen jumped around.

Little Bun was popular as Captain America, holding babies and embracing young girls in mini-skirts. He was shy by nature clearly but the mask gave him a veneer of confidence as it did anonymity.

But isn’t that the case with all our favorite superheroes?

I visit London frequently and make it a point to take in one or two exhibits each time. Art and culture are abundant and highly accessible in the Big Smoke, so there really is no excuse not to pop by The Photographers’ Gallery on top of Oxford Circus, or the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in South Kensington.

During my last two visits, I saw the following photography-related shows which reminded me how powerful this medium remains despite the growing prevalence of digital video, and why funds are still invested in high quality photography work.

Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis at the Natural History Museum (until 8SEP)

I first saw Salgado’s work as part of his powerful series “Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age” which looked at laborers from 26 countries in different fields – mining, oil refinery, coffee and tea plantations, ditches and canals. Salgado had been accused of romanticizing the Third World, but they hold irrevocabe and brutal truth. After “Workers” came “Migrations”, a six-year photographic chronicle of the “human flood tides set loose around the world by wars, famines or just people searching for work.” I imagine that after documenting so much human suffering and destruction, Salgado turned to nature or what was left of nature’s spoils.

The best online showcase of Genesis is by Time’s Lightbox but nothing prepared me for the haunting beauty of seeing them in all their spectacular detail. Since 2004, Salgado made a total of 34 trips to the Kalahari Desert, the jungles of Indonesia, the Galápagos Islands and Madagascar, across the Antarctic, Falkland Islands, South Sandwich Islands and across Siberia with the nomadic Nenets. Thank god for benches, I lingered there quite mesmerized by sea lions staring back at me (see above), a sea of chin-strapped penguins diving into the sea’s abyss and Siberia Nenet hunters driving reindeer across icy plains. You’d think that his choice of monochrome for nature was a compromise, but I emerged convinced of its deliberative and arresting impact.

Man Ray Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery (until 27MAY)

“A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.” ~ Man Ray, Oct. 2, 1966

[Man Ray, "Self-portrait"]

This is the first major museum retrospective of Man Ray’s portraits featuring more than 150 prints taken by him between 1916 and 1968. Man Ray (born Michael Emmanuelle Radnitzky in 1890, Philadelphia) was a self-taught photographer who came to the medium as a way of recording his paintings, and worked in fashion and later fine art photography. He was associated with the Surrealists, having moved to Paris in 1921 at the height of the avant-garde movement, and kept the company of Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein and Merete Oppenheim, taking their portraits and experimenting mediums with their influences. But one of his most important piece of work has to be the perfecting of solarisation, which occurs when an image recorded on a negative or on a photographic print is wholly or partially reversed in tone so that dark areas appear light or light areas appear dark. The Guardian featured a selection of his work here.

Sony World  Photography at Sommerset House (ended 12MAY)

[Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi, Overall Youth Photographer of the Year, 2013 Sony World Photography Awards]

Unfortunately over for now, the Sony World Photography Awards are widely recognised as one of the world’s leading photography competitions. Held annually at Somerset House, which is reason alone to visit, it was such a pleasure viewing the award-winning and shortlisted entries of both the student, amateur and professional categories. As I have banged on before, the DSLR has really pushed photography into a common denominator ground. The full list of winners and their work here.

And finally, I present the wonderful spectacle of London in the spring via my Iphone. Have I convinced you to head there now?

It’s odd to see the screaming pronouncements “WASH! IRON!” through a sea of laundry along a busy alley. Sunday afternoon meant residents were out in the streets, and hanging every piece of clothing on bamboo poles, wooden pegs, thin string that hung from one house to the next. On a beautiful day, it could almost pass as a quirky art installation.

As I moved closer, the hiss of steamers and thudding of the washing machines grew louder. The shop’s plastic shields used for staving off the cold swayed to a soft ryhthm as the billowing steam bumped gently against it. Poke your head through them and the noise is deafening.

I approached hesitantly and began my inquiries despite her blank expression. Do you get mostly uniforms or civilian laundry? Do you do dry cleaning? Why, when most residents would prefer to save money, would they drop their clothing here? Can you really de-shrink a badly laundered sweater?

Her scowl was unfriendly and persistently silent to my questions. After a flicker at my camera, she stared ahead as if right through me.

Soon, the tumbling stopped, as did the spitting steamers. There was only the backnoise of the alley, and her unwavering wall that said, maybe you should return back to the street.

February 2013

I confess that nowadays, the Iphone has become de facto of a wieldy DSLR despite my occasional dissatisfaction with the output quality of my old Iphone. My recent spat of short trips both in and out of China - Hunan and Hubei provinces, London, Paris, Milan – required light packing and a DSLR was too much of a burden if I wanted to retain the sanity of no luggage check-in. However, now that the Ricoh GR V is out, my wallet may soon be (en)lightened in an exchange for a less conspicuous presence in the street.

Don’t get me wrong, a DSLR and tripod set up is still optimal for shooting old houses but each trip is ultimately an expedition. I miss terribly the process of carefully framing details and angles, and returning repeatedly to get it right. The sense of accomplishment is more purposeful and different.

Putting aside issues of photographer’s rights that has ignited debate since Instagram was acquired by Facebook, I love that photo apps have further democratized photography, forcing higher standards of creativity given its easy accessibility. We now have war photography shot in Hipstagram, such as NYT photographer Damon Winter who had his Hipstagram photo on the front page of the broadsheet, awards and exhibitions dedicated to mobile photography, fashion influenced Instagram and of course, the street photography genre has only been boosted in itse popularity by the smartphone.

I recall the morning I discovered Instagram, I had offered to shoot a friend’s wedding as a backup. I ditched my DSLR by the afternoon what with runnnig around in high heels and ended up shooting all 12 hours on my phone. I processed and delivered the best photos in real time, to the joy of the couple. Society today is such that we prize speed first, quality is a close second.

The highlight of my week has to be reading about this fantastic Instagram project of @echosight, a joint-Instagram account between photographers Danny Ghitis in New York and Daniella Zalcman in London.

“The entire process takes place on a phone: Images are uploaded to a Google Drive folder, each pulls photos from the other and creates the final piece in an app called Image Blender. Each photo is uploaded to the Instagram account with a quote, something that Ghitis initiated in order to communicate the feeling being conveyed. “Photos are very abstract and words can be very literal so I didn’t want to go too far in one direction,” he said.”

This goes to show you the boundless potential of photography and art with none of the trappings of cost and burden of equipment. With no exuses, it is the photographer’s eye that has to prevail.

Above: A signboard/scaffold of an aspirational Chinese skyline, shielding a sadly torn down lane near Shanghai Xintiandi by Xinye Lu

Shanghai’s benevolent and beautiful spring weather is upon us, so get out there and enjoy it before the humidity and heat inflict their seasonal cruelty come June. Now, I may moan endlessly about the incessant dust and grime in Shanghai but good grief, a recent transition through Beijing made me realize how serious the smog problem there really was. Without the sun, how do photographers play with light and shadows? Thank god, we still (sometimes) have that in Shanghai!

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve missed my litany of China and photography-related links. Below is a short round up of a few from the Shanghai Street Stories’ Facebook page. You can follow me there for more links.

- Turns out The Dude (actor Jeff Bridges, for those who have not yet soaked up his awesomeness in movie, “The Big Lebowski”) is a photographer, armed with a Widelux camera, a fully mechanical swing-lens panoramic camera, which only ups Bridges’ cool factor.

“The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn’t accurate, and there’s no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that. It’s something I aspire to in all my work — a lack of preciousness that makes things more human and honest, a willingness to receive what’s there in the moment and to let go of the result. Getting out of the way seems to be one of the main tasks for me as an artist.”

I’d love to get my hands on his book “Pictures”, a collection of all his work photographed on all his movie sets. I recommend spending time on Bridges’ website, one word: “awesome”. I actually think it’s made up of his real handwriting.

- Italian photographer Michele Palazzi explored the theme of migration and the disconnect from nomadic culture for many Mongolians. A very memorable and almost romantic piece of work. He was also the 2013 winner of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management’s Environmental Photographer of the Year Award.

- Al Jazeera profiles ‘The New African Photography’ in a 6-Episode series, showcasing how a new generation of African photographers are celebrating the region’s attributes, while remaining unflinchingly honest about the real problems facing their countries. I believe the first episode looks at Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke is the founder of Invisible Borders, an annual photographic project that takes African artists on a road trip across the continent.

- Li Zhensheng was a photojournalist for the local paper in Harbin where he did his life’s work documenting the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. At the time, he was to capture only the “positive” images of sweeping fervor among the “jubilant masses” including the Red Army. But he hid thousands of negatives of denunciations and criticism sessions that shed blood and ripped apart families and friends. New York Times’ Lens featured his panoramic work of the Cultural Revolution here. He was interviewed here (at 18:40 minutes) of this “China Rising” documentary by Al Jazeera.

The silence has been deafening around here, no? The guilt that has ballooned over my absence from the blog nags at me constantly, only made worse when I run into friends/readers who ask with an arched brow, “So … I see you’ve stopped blogging…”. I would smile sheepishly with mumbled promises to return with that one story of an old Shanghai gangster’s villa on Beijing Lu, or my Instagram series on Hamilton House, or my interview with the founder of Disappearing Corners.

Now I am quite horrified to see that in another month, it would have been a year since I last posted on the blog. For shame! Excuses are aplenty – a wedding (and in two cities no less), my increased involvement in a policy-oriented speaker series for the Hopkins China Forum and Young China Watchers (YCW) in Shanghai, a new job that has wholly and utterly consumed me, and a lot of traveling in between.

Mind you, I have not entirely forsaken all that is related to the blog. For those who follow me on Facebook, I am still actively posting China-related and photography-related links and giving small updates about talks and interviews.

Most of my recent publications have been on the China-Central Asia project including for Asia Society (“Gallery/Interview: Photographer Sue Anne Tay Captures Kyrgyzstan’s Bustling Bazaars, Jul12) and 信睿 (The Thinker) (”Interview: From Shanghai to Central Asia”《从上海到中亚: 城市街头摄影指南》, Sep12).

This year so far, I have given a talk on the former Jewish Ghetto in Hongkou at the Limmud (Hebrew for learning) China conference, and given a presentation to a group of Chinese history PhD students at the University of Bristol studying under Professor Robert Bickers, who is also the project Director of Historical Photographs of China and Visualising China. I couldn’t be more pleased to meet the dedicated team helmed by Jamie Carstairs that has digitized tens of thousands of archived photographs of China dating as far back as late 19th century, researched and catalogued them to share in the public domain. Bristol is simply lovely.

They say the first step is always the hardest. So to all the (remaining) readers out there, thanks for the occasional email and tidbits of places I should photograph. Shanghai Street Stories is up and running again! But we’ll be taking baby steps, so bear with us.

[Note 17May 2013: You can learn more about the policy-oriented speaker series at Hopkins China Forum and about the group Young China Watchers.]

As part of the monthly Hopkins China Forum series, I’ll be moderating a very interesting panel discussion tomorrow entitled “China’s Changing Megacities” with Daan Roggeveen, architect and founder/director of the Go West Project, and author of “How the City Moved to Mr Sun”. Duncan Hewitt, Shanghai Correspondent for Newsweek and author of“Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China” will be offering commentary on the topic as well.

The talk will revolve around the break-neck development of cities in Central and Western China which have focused solely on their physical infrastructure, but now need to face societal issues of sustainability, education, and cultural development.

Over the next two decades around 300 million Chinese villagers will move to the city, creating the largest urban society the world has ever seen. Small towns in central and western China are transforming at breakneck pace into huge metropolises with many millions of inhabitants, rivaling global cities like Rio de Janeiro, London,and Moscow, though their names are unknown in the rest of the world.  These unexplored cities in the heart of China have focused solely on their physical development over the past decade, but when the physics of their development slows down, as it must, they will then need to shift toward non-physical aspects of development, such as education, sustainability, and most importantly cultural life.  Architect Daan Roggeveen (Go West Project) and journalist Duncan Hewitt (Newsweek) will challenge certain assumptions about the nature of Chinese society and pose the question: Can China transform its triumph of brick and concrete into a model that can be a beacon for the world?

Both Daan and Duncan’s books will be on sale during the event, I encourage you to pick up a copy and have a pint at the same time!

The talk will be at Wooden Box, 9 Qinghai Lu, near Nanjing Xi Lu (青海路9号, 近南京西路) on Tuesday, June 26th at 7pm, and I encourage you to RSVP to Frank Tsai at editor[at]shanghai-review.org, since seating may be limited.

I’ve been quite tied up preparing for a private exhibit at my workplace based on my China in Central Asia work. The satisfaction of curating and planning a collection and working with the printer is the other part of photography I really enjoy. I’m working hard to get another public exhibit going, one that is more diverse than the confines of the documentary bent.

Separately, I have published a full photo essay on China’s growing economic and social influence in the Central Asian region. With the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) underway now in Beijing, it’s a timely issue that I hope will catch some eyeballs!

Which is to say that I’ve been rather pre-occupied but here are a few links that has caught my eye over the last week or so. I realize I haven’t published much on Shanghai which I hope to rectify very soon. I’ve been conducting a few photo walks here and there, and while it’s great to share ideas and facts, it’s not always conducive to shooting and interviewing.

- This is an excellent 3-part BBC documentary which profiles Urban Planning Professor Ruan Yisan of Tongji University who is responsible for saving and preserving heritage sites in metropolitan and rural Shanghai, including designing the promenade that exists along the Bund and trying to keep water towns like Zhujiajiao authentic and not devolve into “fake antiques”. Well into his 70s, his eye for historical detail and lobbying for local authorities to conform to conservation regulations are admirable. Highly recommended to devote 15 mins to this, you’ll learn a lot. Part 1, 2 and 3.

“Sometimes, I feel I am fighting a losing battle. People don’t understand the importance of our work. All they want is modernisation. But I carry on regardlessly.”

- “In China, What Does it Mean to be a Patriot?” A thought provoking piece which reflects and responds to Chinese writer and blogger Li Chengpeng’s own piece “Patriotism with Chinese Characteristics”. (hat tip to reader Ray Deng whom I had the pleasure of meeting when he was in town)

- Readers interested in learning more about modern architecture in China, I recommend architectural designer and theorist Evan Chakroff’s blog Tenuous Resilience. Thanks to a link back from his site (thanks, Evan!) I spent an enjoyable hour ploughing through his archives.

- Here’s a collection of archived color photos of “Old China” 60 years back taken by an American fighter pilot H. Allen Larsen. Given that it is still the Republican era, you see a great mix of traditional and Western influences in fashion and infrastructure, especially in Shanghai.

For more, you can follow me via the blog’s Facebook page and Twitter.