Introduction
Emperor's River
Photographing along China's Grand Canal
The story of China’s on-going economic expansion is told daily, in the form of countless media reports about soaring export figures, run-away pollution, trade imbalances, resource consumption, and the like. This kind of media coverage gives us a false sense of being sufficiently informed, of being in control. But, no matter how many reports and statistics we digest, I find this kind of information fails to capture the scale and the depth of the enormous changes occurring there, which will have lasting global effects.
The photographic exploration I undertook in 2009 & 2010 is my attempt to capture some of what 24/7 news coverage is unable to convey, and to better understand the interdependent nature of our relationship to this ever more influential region.
It is clear that the economic expansion occurring in China is fueled by the world’s voracious hunger for, and consumption of inexpensive goods produced there. In this way we, the world’s consumers, are inextricably tied to the rapid and wide spread changes which chinese society is undergoing.
To better understand all of this, and to achieve a better overview, I resolved to cast a wide net, photographing in urban, industrial, and rural areas. I followed the length of the Grand Canal, located in the heavily populated flats of Eastern China’s alluvial plain.
Little known in the West, it stretches over a thousand miles from Beijing to Hangzhou, connecting cities large and small, and traversing both the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers. Construction began ca. 460 BC, spanned several dynasties, and was completed in 609 AD. Over two millennia, the Grand Canal has functioned as a vital economic and cultural engine. Though northern stretches of it have fallen into disrepair, the Grand Canal still stands as the world's largest water project to date. It is currently under review for World Heritage status by UNESCO.
What I found as I traveled the length of the Grand Canal, was a breathtaking, fastpaced mashup of contradictions and disparities; antiquity vs. modernity; the newly rich vs. the long suffering poor; and the strangest of bedfellows - communism intertwined with unbridled capitalism.
The standard single-frame photograph felt too limited in tackling such a varied subject, so I chose instead to work panoramically, assembling my images out of many overlapping exposures. This approach allowed me to craft expansive, temporally and visually layered views with multiple fulcrums, creating images I felt were capable of holding the complexities of the scenes I encountered.
The images I have made along the course of the Grand Canal are analogous to a core sample, revealing layers of contemporary China's variegated socio-economic strata. These images conflate time, as China itself conflates its past with the future. I intend them to provide context, and foster a better understanding of the effects of our habits as consumers. I hope they put a face on the anonymous statistics we receive through the media, and make visceral how these numbers actually play out on the ground.
Philipp Scholz Rittermann, 2011