More from the archive

[nikkortorokkor]

It's a gloomy day, and I've been enjoying playing with some old images.

Here are a few more from the Nanchang file.

Dusk - Downtown Nanchang. I like the blurred movement of the pedestrians - but maybe it annoys you.


More Blur. I tried cropping out the black "frame" of the wall - but all you get is a blurry photo - it loses its voyeuristic, behind the curtain drama.


Something about the Maoist worker's coat and the slightly pensive look on this porter's strongly handsome face always makes me pause over this one. He could've stepped out of a propaganda poster.


And he's off!


Builders of a new China. I've got too many photos of cyclists' backs, taken as I rode too and from work myself. I like the humour of this one, though. The husband and wife on the left are on an electric moped; their workmate is getting a tow.


Pedalling towards Utopia?

All images from an Olympus C-750 UZ P&S, hand held in Nanchang, Jiangxi China - 2003.

[nikonbob]

Thanks for posting more of your China collection. It is one of those places that has fascinated me since I was a kid. I'd have to agree with your comments on the shot of the porter. At the rate China is going forward I wonder if the Nanchang of today is recognizable in comparison to your 2003 photos of it.

Bob

[Deleted]

Thanks Michael. I'll be there (China) in less than two months! Can't wait.

Wayne

[nikkortorokkor]

Thanks, Bob & Wayne, for the comments.

Bob, you are right. The last 4 photos were made on a brand new, 3 lane boulevard leading to a tertiary education zone just to the west of the city. The provincial university moved its campus out there, and a whole group of public and private colleges joined them. About 4 months before I took these photos there was nothing but dirt roads there. A week after the photo was taken, those red dirt verges and central reservation had been planted out with semi-mature trees. And the half timbered shops in the first picture will probably have been replaced by another high rise too. Amazing.
Of course, with the provincial uni on one side of the city, the city uni had to build its new campus on the other side (the old campuses are about a mile from one another). To overcome this seeming fatal planning flaw, the two new precincts are being connected by an underground railway, which will also run under the central city.

I've just been reading Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. He touches on the "Haussmannization" of Paris in the mid 19th C., when large sections of the old city were leveled to make way for new, arrow straight boulevards. Schivelbusch documents the feeling of dislocation this caused amongst old Parisians. My wife teaches English to a group of senior citizen immigrants here in NZ. One recently returned to Beijing, just before the games. She came back to Christchurch quite upset - the city she had grown up in was gone, or at least changed beyond recognition. I recognized the symptoms as the same as those experienced by Parisians 150 years ago.

Wayne, I look forward to seeing your pictures of your trip! Guiping and I keep vacillating over going back. Packing up the house & renting it out is a chore I'm not looking forward to - last time I moved to China, my possessions fitted into a backpack. Ah, the tyranny of material wealth! But when I look at these photos I know that it's almost time to go.