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Sun Lu Lu, 11, was orphaned in 1999, and was left to live with her grandmother Li Ru Chun in Wang Dong Village, Jiangsu Province, China.

Fan Jian Bo, 11, was orphaned in 1998, and now lives with his aunt and uncle in Fanzhuang Village, Jiangsu Province, China.

Yan Jing Ya, 9, was orphaned and now lives with his grandparents in rural Yi Ling Village, Jiangsu Province, China.

Huo Yang Xia cries as she describes the life of her orphaned grandson Fan Wen Jie, 11, who lives with her in Fanzhuan Village, Jiangsu Province, China.

Flyer for the opening of China Youth at FeztivArt

Location of Art + Shanghai

Four of my images (above) from the series Young and Abandoned, portraits of orphans on the verge of institutionalization in rural Jiangsu Province, China, will be included in an exhibition at Fe艺术iv’Art (Feztiv Art) in Shanghai, China, from January 22-26th, 2010. There is an opening on January 22 at 6:30 pm. I’ll be there.

The festival was created by the Artdidact, the Artistic Commission of the French Junior Chamber International of Shanghai, whose aim is “to take part and contribute to the progress of the global community by giving to the young the opportunity to develop their leadership skills, their social responsibility and the necessary solidarity for taking actions to produce positive changes. Members of the JCI identify and realize projects to serve the positive evolution of their city in all fields: arts, social, economics, cultural, community…”

The subject of the exhibition is “China Youth,” and the pictures will be on display at Art + Shanghai Gallery at Fumin Lu, Lane 22, House 2, (Near Yanan Lu). Phone: +86-21 6248 4388. In the off-chance that someone in Shanghai is reading this, I hope to see you there.

M. Scott Brauer - Haikou, Hainan, China.

Happy holidays from dvafoto. May your days be full of good food, good pictures, and good times with friends and family.

Lovebryan.com - Image by Sara Lafleur

I can’t believe I haven’t linked to lovebryan.com yet. The brainchild of Bryan Derballa, the site aggregates the work of 8 member photographers and an oscillating contingent of less-frequent contributors. The work presented is all over the place, but mostly it’s raw and creative and unexpected and fun. You might find a mushroom-filled trip to a lake, chickens and naked babies, a trip on a cruise ship, the scene behind the scenes of what looks like a horror music video, a visual-psycho-analysis of one’s kid sister, road trips, or nostalgia for the summer you wish you had last year. It’s hard not to get lost in there for hours.

An imam speaks at a small mosque in Pingliang, Gansu, China.

Sorry for the absence of posts here.  Haven’t had reliable internet access for the better part of a month.  Here are a few pictures from the past couple of weeks along with a promise to return to regular posting on dvafoto. I’m currently in northern Montana, and I can be reached by phone at +1-917-512-3473.

A store owner sits outside of the shop where he sells religious items to Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims in Xiahe, Gansu Province, China. The city houses the Labrang Monastery (Labuleng Si), one of the most important Tibetan monasteries outside of Tibet.

Spanky Spangler comes up short on a 200-foot daredevil jump at the culmination of Evel Knievel Days in Butte, Montana, USA.

The dunes of the Gobi Desert at night near Dunhuang, Gansu, China.

Mannequins display clothing for sale in a window display in the Bund area of Shanghai, China.

I’ve recently completed a body of work on China’s domestic consumer market. Long dormant, recent years have shown the billion or so potential consumers make an attractive target for the companies throughout the world. Coca-Cola knew this early on, but now companies such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Mercedes-Benz, H&M, Louis Vitton, Pizza Hut, and any other brand you know have opened shops in major urban centers in China.

Politicians in Beijing have been downplaying the severity of China’s share of the global economic crisis. Outlooks remain optimistic and, thanks in part to half-trillion-dollar stimulus plans, the country’s economic growth has not declined as rapidly as some had predicted. Through tax incentives, government-provided shopping vouchers, a lowering Consumer Price Index, and a nationwide “Buy China” movement, consumer spending in China has remained strong throughout recent months and is expected to grow in the near future. While many doubt that the country’s domestic market will bring swift respite to the world’s economies, evidence suggests it has done much to soften the blow to China’s bottom line.

A jewelry merchant passes out free bracelets and necklaces to a few lucky passers-by outside a supermarket in Nanjing, China. The merchant hoped the giveaway would act a promotion for his store.

People walk through a wholesale market near the Fuzi Miao area of Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. This market supplies consumer goods to smaller markets and shops in the rest of the city.

Tourists and shoppers walk into the Nanjing East Road subway station in Shanghai, China.

Shoppers check out at a discount clothing section of a large department store in Nanjing, China.

People look at recent offerings of the revitalized MG car company in Nanjing, China. Originally a British company, MG Nanjing has taken over the brand and will market cars in China starting in 2007, with plans to move to the British market in later years.

Shoppers ride an escalator from Wal-Mart in Wanda Plaza in the central Xinjeikou shopping district in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

A family loads consumer goods onto a truck in Guilin, Guangxi Province, China.

People look into a Mercedes-Benz car dealership in central Shanghai, China.

People walks past high-fashion stores and billboards at the Deji Plaza shopping mall in the central Xinjeikou shopping area of Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

People shop for small electronics at a wholesale market in the Fuzi Miao area of Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. The market acts as a distributor of consumer goods to shops and smaller markets throughout the city.

A Trust-Mart supermarket employee rests on an escalator between floors of the supermarket in Nanjing, China.

More work from the series can be seen on my website, “Hao shaoxi, hao shaoxi: China’s domestic consumer market”.

The New York Times Lens Blog has just published a heretofore unknown picture of the Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. AP reporter Terril Jones had been covering the demonstrations and snapped a picture of the famous confrontation between an unknown man and a line of tanks. The Lens blog has more details. I am quite surprised Jones had shown the picture only to friends previously.

Lens also interviewed 4 photographers who each got the iconic shot: Charlie Cole, Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. This is not to be missed; great behind-the-scenes stories about the shooting conditions and the difficulty of getting the pictures out (involving toilets and poorly-dressed hippies!). Youtube has video of the confrontation and the PBS Frontline documentary Tank Man explores contemporary Chinese perspectives on the famous photo.

James Fallows reports about his experience in Tiananmen Square the night before the 20th Anniversary this week and his wife’s the day of and Shanghaiist has video of plainclothes police interrupting international news reports with, of all things, umbrellas.

Meanwhile, BagNewsNotes has a dispatch from Alan Chin in Beijing on the Anniversary, ChinaBeat has a ton of contemporary and historical reporting on the 1989 events, and there’s plenty more. DanWei’s must-read China news is another great place for a variety of reporting and remembrance; I can’t link to search results, so you’ll just have to type in the words yourself. And here’s a couple of stories about information about 1989 slipping past China’s censors in the past couple of years. Magnum’s also got a small but interesting edit of a number of photographers’ pictures from Tiananmen.

Meanwhile, further south, it’s been a couple of days just like all others.

Visura Magazine - New York Photo Festival 09 special issue

There’s been a lot of online coverage of the 2009 New York Photo Festival, mostly good but some bad. But, I hadn’t seen many of the actual photos from the festival. Visura Magazine comes to the rescue with a special issue devoted to the festival. So much work to look through…

Taliban tactician holding a rifle that is not his - photo by Zackary Canepari - published and retracted by The New York Times

As PDNPulse initially reported, the New York Times issued a retraction this week regarding the above photo by Zackary Canepari.

“A picture on May 5 with the continuation of a front-page article about the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and the strategic advantages it offers to Taliban insurgents fighting American troops, showed a silhouetted Taliban logistics tactician, who was interviewed for the article, holding a rifle, creating the impression that the weapon belonged to him. The Times subsequently learned from the photographer that the rifle belonged to the owner of a home in Pakistan where the interview took place, and that the Taliban tactician had held the weapon only for the purpose of the photograph.

“Had The Times known this information at the time of publication, it would not have used the photograph to illustrate the article.” -New York Times editors’ note

The photo was removed from the Times website, but since the initial report of the ethical breach, the photographer’s identity was ferreted out, as was the photo in question. PDNPulse’s report included this line to readers, “Do you think this is over the line?” and others online have argued that this isn’t a big issue. This is wrong.

Unlike the other recent photo manipulation charge to hit photoblogs, Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen’s overzealous color correction that led to disqualification in a photo contest, Canepari’s transgression purports to show visual facts that are not true. The photo misleads viewers of the photo into thinking that this particular military strategy on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border involves more armament than it actually does. There’s a temptation to discount the complaints about the photo because the photo doesn’t look manipulated and because the facts aren’t far off from what the photo shows. That is, guns are likely involved in this particular operation, as they are in most military operations, so who cares whether or not this particular person actually carries a weapon or not?

Photo manipulation is most harmful to a reporter/photographer/publication’s credibility precisely when it is most subtle. We can all laugh at the more blatant photoshop disasters, but no one mistakes the obvious manipulations of images as representations of fact. The Danish photographer’s pictures may push the bounds of acceptable journalistic post production practices, but the cartoonish colors in the image obviously stem from artistic impulses rather than an intent to mislead and misinform. One can reasonbly expect a layman to realize that the colors have been consistently pumped up a bit just because one rarely encounters such vivid colorization in reality.

But, when a picture looks like the truth (i.e., when what looks like a documentary image is, in fact posed, or when a basketball is cloned into a picture of a high school match), viewers believe that it is the truth. Guys with guns are the norm in pictures from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. A layman could not reasonably discern the manipulation in Canepari’s picture as a falsehood or artistic interpretation in a portrait situation. The image, which was presented by the photographer as a documentary account of the Taliban logistics tactician as he normally operates, is a deception. If an image that looks very real is fake, what guarantees that any images in a newspaper show the facts as they are?

The New York Times acted correctly in retracting the photo.

Your thoughts?

Tivadar Domaniczky / VII Network - Palestinians are seen around their destroyed homes in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City in the Gaza Strip.

Matt’s on the road at the moment, but passed along this link to Tivadar Domaniczky’s excellent “Breathing Dust – Gaza Strip.” Beautiful, lyrical journalism, remniscent of late-90s Majoli.

John Francis Peters - from Just a Dream

There’s been no shortage of coverage of the current economic crisis affecting the US, but John Francis Peters‘ “Just a Dream” project has really drawn me in. To see the essay, go to Peters’ website and find “Just a Dream” under “New Work.” As in other essays on the topic, especially in essays on “destination du jour” Detroit, the decay and abandonment are prominent. This essay, though, in the still-inflated balloon or the damp spot on the garage floor under the house, communicates the currency of the economic violence ripping through towns across the country. Not only have these houses been ripped out from under their previous tenants, but the removal happened swiftly, fiercely, and probably just last week. I saw these pictures a few weeks ago, but the communication in these little details keeps drawing me in.

From the artist statement:

After a few minutes wandering through oddly colored rooms and taking in the dull smells of animal dander and black mold, something else begins to absorb into my sense. It can only be described through how I feel the energy in the rooms, distress, sadness, loss. Something else is still in the home and it hints at its existence through violent holes in the wall, children’s stickers, an old lamp, curdled milk, a pink rubber ball, a suicide note written in magic marker.”