Rio de Janeiro (snapshot)

Adding to the somewhat strange textures that "found" filters can create...

Ipanema beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Things they left behind

I just posted on a friend's blog with photos from China, of a near-empty village where many people have moved to Brazil and the United States. I've posted there mainly because the readership of Mauricio's blog is largely Brazilian (Mauricio is from Sao Paulo), and I haven't figured out how to cross-post it onto my blog.

The link is here:

Aqui e Acola: Things they left behind

B&W photos from Taishan

Black and White photos from Taishan county.


Women sort through a pile of mud in order to find baby crabs, which they then sell to a man at 100 crabs/20 RMB (a little less than $3 USD). The guy then either sells the crabs or raises them until they are big and he sells them for a crabload. We got our full-size crabs for 45 RMB, about $7 USD.
For two nights, I stayed in Sha-Lan village, which has recently seen a large emigration to Brazil. Indeed, two of the families I met in Brazil hailed from this village, and I was able to contact their families to see their homes they left behind.


The family I stayed with had a son who was 19, and was quite severely mentally retarded. He acted like a 3 or 4 year old, crying when he didn't get something, pouting to his mom, and woke up everyone at 5 am for no reason. He seemed to love photography; I allowed him to take my photo and he loved it when I took his. At one point, he ran to his older sister's room and grabbed her Hello Kitty. I like the picture for some reason.

Sha-Lan village.
Sha-Lan village

Taishan, the roots of the diaspora

The above photo is of my maternal grandfather's village in Haiyan, literally "Sea Banquet." We had seafood everyday. One meal I counted a total of eight different kinds of fish.

Side note: Blogger has a somewhat annoying format in that it seems to post photos backwards in the order in which I upload them.

Anyways, I've spent the past few days in the countryside, in the Guangdong county of Taishan, a major exporter of fine Chinese products. I mean immigrants. In many of the countries I've been to so far, a large number of the immigrants have come from this single county, Taishan. I think I read somewhere that over half of the population that is "Taishanese" is actually living abroad.

Apparently I am 75% Taishanese, which I had no idea about until recently, when I found out that my paternal grandmother's family was originally from a village in Taishan. Going back to my "old home" in China is an incredible experience; an auntie who helped guide me around the villages pointed out villages in the distance, commenting, "that village went to England. That village went to Brazil."

Brazil.

Everyone was talking about Brazil. Brazil is the new America, by the way. Seriously, everybody was talking about Brazil, and everybody is going to Brazil. I guess people have started realizing that America isn't America anymore.

Old ladies in my maternal grandfather's village in Haiyan. They have just been given 100 RMB (about $14 USD) by a successful entrepreneur who made it out of the village.
The ancestral temple in Haiyan. The first character on the temple reads my mother's last name, "Rong," or "Yung" in Cantonese.

The house that my maternal grandfather built. He was a "Lao Hua Qiao" (overseas Chinese) who went to America, and apparently South America as well. He died when my mom was five and she has no recollection of him. Apparently he suffered prejudice in America. Surprise.
The ancestral shrine in the house my grandfather built.


Now we can move on to my paternal grandmother's village, or at least what I believe is my paternal grandmother's village. She was born in California, but her parents were from Taishan. She even has the same last name as my maternal grandmother, Wu, or "Ng" in Cantonese. Yes, nnnnnngggggggggg. It's not missing at consonants. Try it.



Actually, the village wasn't that remote.


That's me in front of my paternal grandmother's village.


The final village is my maternal grandmother's. I had an "American returning to his roots" moment in which I jumped on the back of a motorcycle to get to this village, because it was inaccessible by car. It was deeply romantic, and I wish I had a film crew on hand.


The driver checks to see if it's the right village. I take photos. This is the ancestral temple.


The Communist ancestral temple. No, just kidding, but I think it used to be the party headquarters, see the faded star?

Some photos from Brazil I like

Riocinha favela, Rio de Janeiro. November, 2008.


Sometimes I am boggled by what is considered "good" photography. I often don't understand a lot of the commentary on what I consider bad photography, where it seems to me what a critic or the photographer says is given equal value to the photographs themselves.
I used to consider most portraits dull and uninspired, and could never understand why great portrait photographers were considered great. But maybe this is changing; over the course of this year, I've begun to take more portraits, because I find so much can be said in the way people compose themselves, either deliberately or candidly. And although I haven't become completely comfortable with taking portraits, I've realized that my main interests in photography lies in photographing people (this was partially realized when, after telling a Chinese construction worker in Ethiopia I was a photographer, he asked me "do you photograph scenes or people?" "People," I answered.).

I guess what I am interested in is how people interact with their environments. I tend not to take "isolated" portraits of people in front of a monochrome background, but to somehow convey a relationship between people and the spaces around them. My favorite photos -- my own and those of others -- are almost always of people and their environment. That all sounds pretty general and squishy, which is probably why I have avoided talking about photography on this blog in the first place.

Here are some of my photos I took in Middletown, Connecticut, during my junior (third) year at Wesleyan University in the autumn of 2006. Incidentally, this was the last time I shot entirely on film. I actually miss using film, something I hope to change once I get back to the States. The smell of toxic chemicals in the darkroom, the magical appearance of images on the paper, and satisfying click and subsequent winding my camera after each exposure -- these are things I miss.

Sometimes I feel my job is pretty hard (well, not the actual fellowship job), because I don't get to photograph things that are obviously beautiful. People sometimes ask why am I photographing this and that, like dorms in a construction site, which might seem mundane. But photographing something like a construction site to me is far more interesting than something like Iguazu falls, where one can find enough pretty pictures on Google images.

Sao Paulo, November, 2008
Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo
Curitiba, Brazil. October 2008

$70,000 USD

This is the cost of paying a Chinese smuggler -- or "Snakehead" -- to get you (a hypothetical Chinese person) into the United States. At least according to some of the Chinese immigrants here in Milan. For reference:

$14,000 USD into Europe. France, Italy, Spain seem like popular destinations.
$10,000 USD into Brazil. Brazil obviously doesn't have the same appeal to Chinese immigrants, but it comes with a nice little legal bonus: if you have a child born in Brazil, you can become a legal resident, and eventually a citizen.

$70,000 is a lot of money. A lot a lot of money. Where this money goes -- bribing officials, obtaining ill-gotten passports or visas, or otherwise, all depends on a case to a case basis, I am told. I find it incredible people would pay this (or go into debt by this amount) in order to pursue the "American dream," which as far as I know, is alive and well for Chinese emigrants.

Food (x) versus Photos (y)

I came to the conclusion a while back that the quality of Chinese food I was eating was quite interestingly correlated with the quality of my project photos.

That is to say, the better Chinese food I was eating at the time, the better my projcet photos were. This relationship is shown below:

You will notice that the relationship is not strictly linear. I believe there are several reasons for this:

1) While the quality of Chinese food can keep going up and up, unfortunately, I don't think I can say the same for my photos yet. I'm trying to be critical of my own photos, after all, how can I expect to get better?
To paraphrase a photographer I admire, "To take good photos isn't hard, to take great photos is very difficult, to take exceptional photos is almost impossible."
Maybe the same can be said for Chinese food, but I must have lower standards. Yum.

2) With a small increase in the quality of food I eat, I get great returns on my photos. After a while, I begin to reach my asymptotic line. Sorry large banquets, I'm getting diminishing returns on your delicious food. In fact, when great Chinese food is served, the quality of project photos might even go down as it is usually in a formalized setting with poor light and too many people too nervous to act natural.

So why is there this relationship?

1) I think most kinds of good documentary photography rely on access. If you can get good access to things, your photos will improve immeasurably. Perhaps my project has strayed from street photography in Peru toward documentary photography in Paraguay and Brazil, back to street photography in Italy. This is largely because of my difficulties with access in both Peru and Italy.

2) In general, most Chinese immigrant communities are relatively insular groups that aren't welcoming of outsiders. If they don't invite you to eat delicious food, you won't be snapping away happily. If you are a welcome presence, you will be offered food and you will eat it. This has proved all too true in six months of project.
2a) As a sidenote, I find it interesting when food gets in the way of photography. Sometimes I'm enjoying a delicious crab (I LOVE CRAB), my hands are all dirty, and I see a good photo pass before my eyes. Shouldn't have been slacking off!

Notes:
a. This only applies to Chinese food
b. This is a preliminary study, results may change with more data points

Get me away from here, I'm dying

The title of the post is just a joke, or more correctly, the name of a song. Anyways, after two weeks in Milan, and unrelenting rain for almost a week now, I need to get out for a breath of fresh air. Frankly, I need a day or two to not think about my project.

Actually, I've been in cities nonstop since I arrived in Ciudad del Este more than three months ago, the only exception being two days on Ilha do Mel (Honey Island) in Brazil. The more time I spend in cities, the greater the urge to get as far away from cities as possible when I take a breather from my project. In fact, while in Brazil, I was planning on having my two day vacation in Florianopolis, a beautiful beach town in southern Brazil. I eventually decided against it, because it seemed too popular and too big. I was happy to hear that Ilha do Mel was "màs salvaje" -- more savage, or rustic -- than most other islands along the southern Brazilian coast.

Now, my project revolves exclusively around cities, and though I've come to appreciate urban living, I do need an escape. I didn't grow up in a city. In fact, Beijing was the first city I felt like I knew intimately after spending about six months there. Since then, I can claim knowing, at least somewhat intimately, New York, Lima, Ciudad del Este, Sao Paulo, and to a lesser degree, Cape Town. Note that I'd probably leave Boston out of that list, despite growing up only thirty five minutes away.

All of which is to say, I decided late today that I'm gonna hop on a train tomorrow and get to the Italian Dolomites mountain range. I've always wanted to see it, and now is a great time -- during the week just before all the Italians go on Christmas vacation and flood the region with tourists, raising price levels. I just need a breather, something refreshing before I jump back into my project, head first.


A few sublime images from my time in South America:

Geysers at sunrise near the Bolivia-Chile border.
Ilha do Mel coast, Brazil


View from the train to Morretes, Brazil, where you then transfer to Ilha do Mel.

Cycling along an incredible lunar landscape in Chile, near Bolivia. The landscapes changed at every corner. Wouter, the Dutchman in front, and I seemed to be the only cyclists braving the winds that day.


My precious time out of cities I want to spend in the most remote, most naturally beautiful places. Perhaps one unexpected side effect of this project is that I'm becoming a naturalist.

Living in a Buddhist Temple, Sao Paulo

As you may know, I lived in a Buddhist temple for nearly three weeks upon my arrival in Sao Paulo. The temple, 中观寺 (Zhong Guan Si), celebrated its fifteenth anniversary during my stay there. It was opened by a monk from Taiwan; now, it is run by four nuns. Three are from Taiwan, and one is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The temple is located in an upper middle class district of Sao Paulo, Vila Mariana. Almost all of the people that go to the temple are Taiwanese -- the first large Chinese group to settle in Sao Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s.

Sao Paulo, first generation

Shopping Center, Mogi das Cruzes, Sao Paulo

Li Jinwang's apartment, Sao Paulo

Cantonese Fish market, Sao Paulo

Senior Citizens Dance, Sao Paulo

Senior Citizens Dance, Sao Paulo

Mogi das Cruzes, Sao Paulo

Samba in Sao Paulo

Sorry about the high-compression images; my mini-computer can't handle anything else.

Retired Chinese people dance samba

Daude from Bahia performs on Black Consciousness Day
At the Ó do Borogodo bar in Sao Paulo. Samba group at right.

samba