I’ve been adding a few more photographs I have taken recently during a visit around the Wenzhou countryside.
Some are added to the Wenzhou section and a couple in the Portraits portfolio.
The Wenzhou collection is part of an ongoing series I started taking in late 2005, over several weekend trips to rural villages in Zhejiang province. Wenzhou is considered an up and coming city where wealth and success are mostly due to its people renowned for their entrepreneurship and acute business sense. I tended to avoid the more chaotic Wenzhou center and instead ventured into the small villages around the city. I think I haven’t seen such a wide gap between rich and poor as I did in this area, where it is common to spot expensive european cars and witness villages where many dwellings are made out of corrugated sheet metal and people share quarters with farmyard animals. Human pollution is one of the worst too, a stark contrast compared to Hangzhou with its manicured parks and gardens, just a few hundred miles north.
The village of Xian Ju is one of those rare places where time has stopped. It is tucked away in a remote mountain range in the Zhejiang province.
What I have been able to record with my camera are just a few glimpses of the dramatic reality and social differences still profound within China’s recent history. It is a village where running water and electricity have been a luxury until a few years ago. Most houses have been in the same exact state as they were 500 years ago. Made of wood and joined together without any use of nails, yet strong enough to withstand centuries.
This was my first visit, I was caught unprepared. It was a very bright sunny spring afternoon and the contrast between sun lit and areas in shadow made it very difficult to get correct exposures. But that paled in comparison to the darkness of the interiors with white hot shafts of light creeping in through the gaps surrounding the wooden walls and doors, forcing me to use high ISO sensitivity (800) and lenses wide open with shutter speeds well below 1/30s, making it very difficult to achieve sharp images. One woman was gracious enough to let me in and take a few photographs of her home. Even the only 2 light-bulbs hanging one in the kitchen and one in the dining room appeared as if they had been there for 200 years. As I snapped along in the kitchen area, I could hear a low pitched faint rumbling noise, when I enquired about it, the woman opened the door to the adjoining toilet area, which consisted of a wooden bucket with a pole sticking out of it to help carry it out into the latrine canal. To my surprise the partition wall just a couple of feet away gave view and explanation to the noise I heard earlier. Two large 400 pound pigs were sleeping in a small pen maybe 10×10 feet wide.
I am planning a second visit later this year.
I’ve been following the activities of this group of men for some time during my visits to the rural village of Louqiao. They all ride bicycles that are retrofitted with a sort of flatbed, transforming it into a pickup bike. Their daily job consists essentially into roaming several rural areas while using either cowbells or in some cases battery operated megaphones to urge people to donate unused junk. They also sift through massive piles of garbage in search of items that might have some resale value.
The images are a short series I took while they were taking a lunch break at a local street bar with pool tables. At first they were hesitant to let me use the camera, but after a few minutes and a couple of pool games later I was able to gain their confidence.
