chongqing | Investigations and Research from My China Days

Fat Baby graces the cover of The New Republic for the Chongqing Dockers

Apr 8, 2014 | Clippings, Portraits, Society, Sports, Youth

Fat Baby graces the cover The New Republic for the Chongqing Dockers

I am very excited to announce that my portrait of Fat Baby is currently gracing the cover of The New Republic. Last fall I traveled down to Chongqing to photograph what would become the turning point in the season for the Dockers, the city’s first American football team. Fat Baby was one of the many characters involved in the ups and downs of this amazing venture. I usually provide a short summary of the articles I shoot, but this one needs to be read in its entirety. Chris Beam does an amazing job capturing the absurdities and struggles of this band of warriors. It’s an excellent look into some of the mutating facets of contemporary Chinese culture. It’s so good, in fact, that Sony Pictures bought the movie rights to the story. Maybe you will see Fat Baby on the big screen one day. Definitely a sports star for the ages.

“Red State” – Red China Rising in Time Magazine

Sep 25, 2011 | Clippings

I am definitely late in publicizing this, but Time Magazine used a bunch of photographs from my Red China Rising series in a recent article on red culture and Maoist thought promotion in China for the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. The foreign and domestic media frenzy surrounding the promotion of red songs and Mao quotes seems to have subsided now, but it certainly doesn’t mean old people won’t keep gathering in public parks to belt out “The East is Red” and other Cultural Revolution favorites. The whole campaign sort of turned into a joke by the end, and certainly never really caught on amongst the youth. The only real impact I could see is that couples dressing up for cheesy romantic portait sessions now like to don People’s Liberation Army garb covered in red stars. Intentional irony or not, march on!

Happy Magic Water Park and Urban Chongqing Clippings

Feb 13, 2011 | Clippings

Two of my photo essays have been in wide circulation recently. Chongqing: The Biggest City You’ve Never Heard Of, after its initial release in Foreign Policy, went on to be published in Internazional, Foreign Policy Spain and Foreign Policy Arabic as pictured above. Happy Magic Water Park, one of my favorite photo essays from last year, also showed up in Geo France, Afar and D Magazine as pictured below. I have some new work coming out very soon, so stay tuned.

Chongqing: The Biggest City You’ve Never Heard Of

Aug 28, 2010 | Architecture, Clippings, Development

It seems that my recent photo essay on Chongqing for Foreign Policy is getting mixed up with a surge of attention focused on the fastest growing city in the world. Both James Fallows and Wired’s Raw File mentioned my work, and there is another excellent piece posted by Caixin entitled Chongqing’s Call to Urban Conversion. Chongqing is easily one of China’s (if not the world’s) greatest experiment in urbanization. How these fledgling city slickers decide to dwell in their newly minted megablocks will set new precedents for living standards across western China. It’s going to be interesting to see whether or not such rampant growth will hit a wall by 2020 when the population of the city center is supposed to reach up to 20 million people. Also, see fellow INSTITUTE artist Nadav Kandar’s photo essay Yangtze, The Long River – easily some of my favorite imagery of the beast that is Chongqing.