By Johanna Yueh
First, they toured the world, appearing in international magazines and newspapers and on the Internet. Now, the Chinese have come to China.
The Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery is showing The Chinese, a photography project by Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer. Braschler and Fischer traveled more than 30,000 kilometers in seven months, hitting 30 of China's 34 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and special regions. Taken in the year just before the 2008 Olympics, the photos show Chinese people from all walks of life posing in their natural environments.
"It was an adventure every single day," Braschler said. "It was an epic trip that we'll never forget, and it definitely changed us forever."
Braschler and Fischer took portraits of a polo-playing entrepreneur in Beijing, a beer factory worker in Qingdao, a Taoist monk on Taishan, a prostitute in Shenzhen and a nomadic family in Qinghai Province. Viewers are introduced to the oldest participant of the Long March still alive, a model family of three in China's richest village, a beggar with a clever one-legged monkey and an 8-year-old Shaolin kung fu student.
The result is a vast array of Chinese faces against an equal number of different backdrops. In a country of 1.3 billion people, it's hard not to think that everyone will get lost in the crowd. Braschler and Fischer's exhibit beseeches viewers—especially foreign viewers—to think differently.
"It's so diverse," Fischer said, trying to describe the country and people. "It's just all the extremes—the most beautiful people I've ever seen, but it's also very cruel. It's everything at the same time. China is much more individualistic. People are so different."
Braschler and Fischer were commissioned by The Guardian to discover what China was all about by capturing scenes of ordinary life in this fast-changing country. Their previous project was a set of 30 portraits of the world's leading football players moments after the final whistle of their matches, presented in the run-up to the 2006 World Cup. For The Chinese, they reversed course and took pictures of people almost no one knew.
In July 2007 the pair set off from Beijing in a Jeep Grand Cherokee with little more than their equipment (including a medium format and large format camera) and their assistant and translator, Fu Yuan. China had just opened up completely to foreign journalists a few months before, a new regulation that some people in the countryside didn't know until Braschler and Fischer showed them an official booklet explaining the law. Such unawareness of life beyond one's village was not uncommon, they found. One woman in Inner Mongolia did not know what the Olympics were. In another instance, a 5-year-old boy ran from Braschler and Fischer, screaming and crying at the sight of them. They were the first non-Chinese people he'd ever seen, and it took a while to convince him they were humans.
And yet, many people were very willing to be their subjects. "People were very open," Braschler said. "They took their time. They invited us."
Fischer agreed. "The biggest surprise was how open people were. Everyone was saying, even professional photographers and journalists tell us, 'Nobody will participate. Nobody wants to be singled out and take so much time for your photography.' It was the opposite. Almost everybody agreed, everybody took so much time. It was a big surprise."
They had charted out a route with ideas about which areas they wanted to visit, but their Chinese road maps often proved to be unreliable once they hit the countryside. Braschler, Fischer and Fu took their Jeep on stretches of unpaved road, often without knowing when they would next see a paved one or how many obstacles they would encounter. They drove over roads ripped up by overloaded coal trucks in Hebei Province, gravel roads that ran through creeks on their ascent to the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, climbed mountain passes more than 4000 meters above sea level in Qinghai and risked getting hit by falling rocks along Sichuan Province's mountain roads. The worst leg of their road trip occurred toward the end, while they drove through the Three Gorges and Yangtze River.
"Rocks and debris were everywhere on the highway," Braschler and Fischer wrote in their China Diary. "We have seen many extraordinary bad roads in China. Forget everything we wrote about that before; this was the first time we were really worried. For good reason as it turned out. Just a couple of days later a big landslide buried a bus and some cars. More than 30 people were found dead."
The photographers faced many other challenges on the road. They battled a respiratory infection, a gastrointestinal infection and three cases of food poisoning. They took countless gambles on where to find hotels or places to stay. In the Taklimakan Desert, near a military nuclear test site, they were allowed to stay at a hotel only after negotiations and on the condition that no one saw them. Foreigners were not allowed in the region without proper paperwork.
Braschler and Fischer could not dodge the bureaucratic red tape so easily at other times. In Shaanxi Province's Yan'an to shoot at the only retirement home for revolutionaries of the Chinese civil war, the institution's director insisted on having official permission to take pictures. Despite the new press freedoms, Braschler and Fischer were forced to seek authorization from the media department of the local government, where they were bounced around from official to official because no one wanted to take the responsibility. They also were questioned at the local police station three times by authorities.
But along with the dangers and the troubles came countless ordinary people and magnificent places at their rawest. Braschler and Fischer wanted to photograph the Chinese in their natural environment, their everyday lives. To be sure, the portraits all were staged—Fischer called it "hyper-realistic"—but in a country characterized by extremes, they felt a touch closer to reality.
And no wonder: the photographers encountered countless peasants struggling to make ends meet and who sometimes had no concept of the West, but they also met millionaires, urbanites and scholars who seemed every bit as worldly and familiar with modern-day comforts as they were. Braschler and Fisher's portraits not only show the disparities between rich and poor but also the gap between China's natural landscapes and the environmental destruction caused by the Chinese economic miracle. Few people—even Chinese people—ever get the chance to witness the breadth of China as Braschler and Fischer did.
"We've had the privilege to get to know this country better than most people," Braschler said. "The question is, do we know China now? I would say the answer is not really, but at least we have a better idea of it now."
The exhibit of about 40 pieces will run until Sept. 10. A book also will be published by Steidl by the end of 2009.
(China.org.cn July 31, 2009)
