Stefen Chow March 12, 2010

Tiananmen Gate, Beijing, China

Stefen Chow (b. 1980, Malaysia) is a photographer based in Beijing and Singapore. Stefen is currently represented by Aurora Select, attended the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2008 and nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass twice in 2009 and 2010. Stefen has worked with publications and organizations including Geo, Time Magazine, Associated Press, Cartier, Nikon and Shell. His works have been exhibited in  Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore and Beijing. His versatility has garnered  awards in cross genres including documentary, corporate and fine art. An accomplished adventurer, Stefen has summited Mount Everest in 2005, becoming one of the rare individuals to climb and photograph the mountain.

About the Photograph:

“I have been trying to sum up my feelings about Beijing after being based there for the last 18 months. On this particular day, Beijing had one of the biggest snow falls, and I knew the picture I was going to get. I made my way to the Tiananmen Gate, and there were Chinese soldiers standing in front of the iconic giant Mao portrait. I stood there in the snow for more than an hour waiting for an expression that humanizes the whole situation. In the end, the instant captured spoke to me about bureaucracy, hardship, respect, beauty and humanity.”

Sheila Zhao September 7, 2009

A Chinese child extra waiting for filming to start. Yixian, Hebei Province, 2008

Sheila Zhao (b. 1983, China) grew up in the United States and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University in 2005. Immediately following graduation, she relocated to Beijing, China, and began a career in photography in 2007. That same year, Sheila was selected to participate in the Angkor Photo Festival’s workshop for young, emerging Asian photographers. Since then, she has worked on a variety of projects around China, including a three months stint as a stills photographer on a Chinese movie set. Most recently, Sheila just completed a six months photo editing internship with TIME Magazine’s Asia photo department in Hong Kong.

About the Photograph:

“In the summer of 2008, I spent some time photographing on a Chinese movie set. The story line was a period drama that involved love, mystery, and of course, kung-fu. Hundreds of extras old and young were cast during filming and one day, I saw this girl [pictured]. She was part of a group of child extras drafted from a nearby martial arts school. I noticed her right away because of her big, sad eyes, and kept an eye on her for the rest of the afternoon. At one point, while waiting for the rest of the cast and crew to start filming, she picked up the prop assigned to her – a dry gourd shell – and stood in a such a way that I thought accentuated her melancholic demeanor. Fortunately, I was close enough to capture this moment.”

Stephen Voss August 12, 2009

First look at their adopted daughter, Nanchang, China 2007

Stephen Voss (b. 1978, United States) is a Washington DC based photographer. His clients include The Smithsonian, Business Week, Time, Stern and National Public Radio among others. He received the Creative Visions Foundation Grant to document homelessness in Portland, Oregon, with his photos subsequently featured in a national exhibit that continues to tour the country. His documentary work covers environmental and globalization issues worldwide, and U.S. politics. He is currently working on a project about his native state of New Jersey exploring the intersections of development and environment.

About the Photograph:

“Karen and Bob are a couple from southern California who allowed me to document their trip to China to adopt their daughter. The process of adoption is arduous and often is delayed for months at a time by the Chinese government. The little girls all have been abandoned by their birth parents, usually within the first few months after birth. This photo came on the day we flew into Nanchang where they would officially adopt their daughter and meet her for the first time. All of the adoptive parents gathered outside the hotel meeting room where the women from the orphanage held each baby. Once the doors were open, Karen and Bob were the first to be called and they both reached out to this small, crying 13-month old named Gan Xin Tian who they decided to name Kailee.”

David Degner July 15, 2009

Xinjiang, China 2008

David Degner (b. 1983, USA) graduated from Western Kentucky University with majors in philosophy and photography in 2007.  He has interned at The Augusta Chronicle, The Press-Enterprise, and The St. Petersburg Times. His won awards in College Photographer of the Year, Hearst, and the American Diversity Project Fellowship.  His work has also been published in TIME magazine. David is currently  photographing weddings in Florida, saving up money and researching for his next project on Sufism.

About the Photograph:

“I was interning at the St. Petersburg Times when I stumbled across the story of Uighurs.  I knew the Olympics would be an ideal time for their separatist movements in Xinjiang to make a statement.  So, when my internship ended, with no jobs on the horizon, I flew to Beijing and took the long route to Xinjiang.  I lived there for about six months learning the language and exploring the oasis towns.  As the Olympics approached there were rumors of arrests, crackdowns, and protests. While confirming one of these rumors of a protest in a small village the police picked me up and kicked me out into Kazakhstan.  This particular photo is from the southern border of Xinjiang where it borders Tibet.  The teen was at a dried-up levee drinking with his girlfriend and screaming at the world.”

Muge Tang February 25, 2009

From the series “Silence”. Chengdu, China

Muge Tang (b.1979, Chongqing, China) graduated from Sichuan University in 2004. He began to seriously photograph the same year and is currently freelancing in Chengdu. His work has been exhibited in Japan (Mio Gallery, Osaka), England (Photo Cinema Gallery, Derby) and Germany GIM-Gallery, Bremen).

About the Photograph:

“This series of photographs were taken between 2006 and 2008. I don’t know how many persona’s a person may have, as I don’t know what the future of the life is. When I met those people, the only thing that I can relied on was the realities around me and my own intuition. Pressing the shutter release button became a ritual of understanding human beings and their lives. This is the epitome of people in society. This is my heart. A kind of reflection, understanding and contradiction.”

Justin Jin January 23, 2009

Garment factory in Zhongshan City, China

As a child Justin Jin (b.1974 in Hong Kong) yearned to see the world. He left for boarding school in England and went on to study philosophy and political science at Cambridge. Reuters hired Justin  as a correspondent in Beijing, giving him an entry into journalism. While working as a reporter, he became fascinated by photography and taught himself, soon after leaving the wire service to produce in-depth photo reportage. In 2002  Justin was selected for the World Press Photo Master Class. Some of his stories are self-initiated, others are commissioned. Having spent the previous seven years in Amsterdam, in 2006 Justin moved to Moscow.

About the Photograph:

“Workers take a dawn break after scrubbing jeans all night using a sanding machine in Mr Huang’s factory in Zhongshan city, China. The blue dust from the jeans is a heavy irritant to the lungs. China, the “factory of the world”, is also the major producer of blue jeans. To meet production demand, thousands of workers sweat through the night scrubbing, spraying and tearing trousers to create their rugged look. At dawn, workers bundle the garment off to another factory for packaging and shipping around the world. The workers are among the 200 million migrant laborers criss-crossing China looking for a better life, at the same time building their country into a mighty industrial power.”

Katharina Hesse August 20, 2008

Katharina Hesse holds a graduate degree in Chinese & Japanese studies from the Institute National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales in Paris. She initially worked as an assistant for German TV and later freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002. In 2003 and 2004 she covered China for Getty photos. Hesse is self-taught in photography and her work has  appeared in Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Marie-Claire, Stern and Vanity Fair among others. Hesse participated in the ” A day in the Life of the American Woman ” project in 2005, and won a NPPA 1st prize award in 2003. Her work has been featured at photography festivals including Visa Pour l’Image, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Angkor Photo Festival  in Cambodia and LOOK3 (USA).

About the Photograph:

“I took a small number of portraits of the Beijing petitioners in late December 2007 as I thought they’d certainly not be allowed to stay around during the Olympics due to China’s obsession with ” keeping face” and showing off as a perfect host city. Many of these people have struggled for years in their native provinces to seek justice, therefore Beijing’s petitioner’s offices are their last recourse. Sadly, most are detained and then sent back to their native provinces. In the days leading up to the Olympics, houses were still being demolished. Recent news from a petitioner describes his situation as follows: ‘our neigborhood has been dismantled… more than 10,000 of us including homeless people live on one bowl of vegetables a day. Some of us have been beaten by officials dressed up as petitioners.’ “

Kosuke Okahara July 8, 2008

Abandoned Leprosy Village. China, 2007

Born in 1980, Kosuke Okahara began his professional career at age 23, after his college graduation. Since the beginning of his career, he has been devoting himself to the theme of “Ibasyo” which refers, in Japanese, to “People’s physical and emotional space where they can exist”, or “Inner-peace of the people.” His  recent work  deals with people who are involved in illegal activities at the bottom of society in Colombia, and young Japanese people who are struggling with self-injury. He has covered stories in Asia, Africa, and South America. His works have been published in TIME.com, Newsweek Japan, PHOTO, AERA, Playboy Japan, Photografica, ASAHI Camera, among others. His photos have also been exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Nikon Gallery, Tokyo, and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. He is a member photographer of Agence VU.

About the Photograph:

“This is a photo story of the daily life of former leprosy patients who exist in the shade of China’s recent economic boom. Though leprosy is an old disease that is 100% curable by medicines, there are over 600 leprosy villages in southern provinces of China housing over 40,000 ex-leprosy patients. In the villages, some people remain disabled but they are not effected by leprosy anymore. When multi-drug therapy became available in China in the 80′s, people recovered from the disease. However, these people still live in villages isolated in remote areas because of the long-lasting discrimination against the the disease. In many villages people do not have an access to clean water and electricity, and live in very difficult conditions. They earn between nothing and $50 per month from the government. Like the poor farming villages they remain outside of China’s recent visable economic growth.”