This collection of photographs is an ongoing series of children’s portraits of rural and urban China. Some are from villages tucked away in deep remote areas which appear to be a world apart from the tremendous economic growth that many cities are experiencing. During the last year I volunteered my spare time to help and assist some families in need. Most of the children roaming the streets are abandoned due to China’s one child per family law. The majority are girls. Luckily in the areas I visited most children are adopted by local families, although many children are still ‘lent’ to other families, in an attempt to avoid consequences for giving birth to more than one child. I’ve witnessed a case where a girl was abandoned and eventually adopted by an other family when she was only a few days old, after 3 years her biological parents took her back with great emotional distress for the adoptive family and completely disregarding the heartbreaking cries of the girl. In rural areas daily life is very tough, animals and humans share the same harsh environment. The hardship and sadness transpires through the eyes of the beautiful children I met and played with.
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.
