We lived mightily, at the limits of our comprehension. We wandered, coloring in the names of our feelings without language, sussing out the real in a place that moved at a pace beyond. Shenzhen is as different at the end of a month than an American city is after five years. The shanties and open fields you see below exist no more, but they were once. Of Milan, I write about the complicated intersectionality between its past and present; Shenzhen is another beast entirely. It dreams faster than we can think. It speaks not in objects, or echoes, or sanctity, but Motion. It propulsively bulldozes forward at a rate quicker than life.
And yet there are whispers. Sometimes you pause, drawn under a tree on a street corner, or stilled by the momentary plainness of an open field. As a government China seeks not only to obliterate its past but also its present, chasing the image of progress at the expense of itself, historical identity be damned. But you cannot erase the fact of existence. What is it you can feel in those moments, when you let yourself hear the world speaking softly? What is the essence that so much blind speed tries to cover up, but can't? You take a deep breath. You take a deep breath and pause, opening your eyes afterwards.
The skyscrapers have nothing on you.
You've absorbed them into your goodness. "If you slow down, you kind of know everything," the painter Laura Hamje once told me. I walked through the melee that is modern China, and specifically the exploding-imploding industrial border-town riot that is Shenzhen, seeking stillness. I looked for the whispers, those plaintive voices that are as much our own as the world's, because they spoke louder to me than all the noise. There is something underneath the surface of all things. It is near; it is quiet; and it doesn't insist on itself.
I hope a glimmer or two of those whispers survive in these images, and find space to blossom in the lives of the wonderful people I met there.
Enjoy!
For my technical process and more, explore the Photography page here.
And yet there are whispers. Sometimes you pause, drawn under a tree on a street corner, or stilled by the momentary plainness of an open field. As a government China seeks not only to obliterate its past but also its present, chasing the image of progress at the expense of itself, historical identity be damned. But you cannot erase the fact of existence. What is it you can feel in those moments, when you let yourself hear the world speaking softly? What is the essence that so much blind speed tries to cover up, but can't? You take a deep breath. You take a deep breath and pause, opening your eyes afterwards.
The skyscrapers have nothing on you.
You've absorbed them into your goodness. "If you slow down, you kind of know everything," the painter Laura Hamje once told me. I walked through the melee that is modern China, and specifically the exploding-imploding industrial border-town riot that is Shenzhen, seeking stillness. I looked for the whispers, those plaintive voices that are as much our own as the world's, because they spoke louder to me than all the noise. There is something underneath the surface of all things. It is near; it is quiet; and it doesn't insist on itself.
I hope a glimmer or two of those whispers survive in these images, and find space to blossom in the lives of the wonderful people I met there.
Enjoy!
For my technical process and more, explore the Photography page here.
