photography

A photo essay from the Old Beijing Stock Exchange – by Jens Schott Knudsen

A photo essay by Christopher Cherry

It's easy for a photographer to be jealous of a writer. We have all that expensive gear, the constant technology upgrades, Jackie Chan mugging on every second billboard telling you there's a new T1200 with flip-out screen and the ability to auto-correct for nostril hairs. Writers have a disposable pen and a bunch of paper.

But in the last few years, that great photographic equaliser has arrived – the mobile phone. It's always on you (the best camera is the one you carry). It's discreet (see the wonderful Michael Christopher Brown's series of photos of commuter’s faces on Beijing's subway line 2). But most importantly it is leveling the artistic playing field in terms of access.

Ed: You've likely seen these North Korean posters before, but here's an illuminating comparison courtesy of our friends at The Wang Post

When the abbots at a Buddhist temple asked an artist to draw an elephant, he was at a loss, because he had never seen an elephant. How do you draw something you’ve never seen?

If you’ve heard the story of the Buddhist artist, then you can understand what happened here. These rosy coloured portraits are the latest propaganda to come out of North Korea, from an artist who has never visited Beijing or personally seen the buildings depicted.

Twelve photos from young China

Between 2008 and 2010, I took a series of photos for The China Beat blog (R.I.P). The theme was China's "new youth", also the focus of my then blog. To capture the experience of being young in today's China in a handful of images is a hopeless (but not fruitless) task, not least for a point-and-shoot artist like myself, who thought SLR was the name of an X-factor winning boy band. Still, it threw up some interesting images, in the course of my life in Beijing and travels out of it.

Pearl Buck, a country wedding, and how to cook pig guts

This spring festival, I read Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth in the perfect location – the farmlands of Anhui, where the book is set. (Read my LARB co-blogger Maura Cunningham’s take on the book here.)