Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

I quite like sometimes to get away from the impressions of a China life that I pick up here in Xi’an, or from various China news sites, and just disappear into a world created by a few contemporary China photographs. I wrote a Note back in May profiling part-time photographer Sue Anne Tay, and her work over at Shanghai Street Stories.  Sue Anne adds thoughtful written commentary to her exquisitely revealing images, which makes her site a treasure trove of Shanghai insight.

A friend of mine, Christopher Cherry, who lives in Beijing, is himself an amateur photographer, who, like Sue Anne, belies such a part-time tag with some incisive images of street life in Beijing. His work can be seen here. Chris also has a wonderful way with words, even if he doesn’t often choose to accompany his pictures with them. Which is, as far as I am concerned, a bit of a shame. His talent for the written word can be seen from the articles that he has included on his personal site – christophercherry.net. He has an ability with the pen that helps lift his photographs from the page, but one that also conjures up many more images in the reader’s mind.

I will include a few pictures from a series he is working on at the moment, taken from outside the vermillion walls of the Forbidden City. They offer an aesthetically satisfying backdrop to some very real images of Beijing life. I have added to them a handful more of his pictures; together they create a theme of sorts, which I shall simply call ‘Looking’. Again, more of Chris’s work can be found on his flickr page.

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