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3030 New Photography in China. Edited by John Millichap. ISBN 988 99384 0 5 Published by 3030 press, copyright 2006.

I came across this book on PingMag (there is an interview and some picture samples on that link). The book is about 190 pages of mixed colour and black and white photography. It features 30 young Chinese photographers (under 30 years of age), most of whom have group exhibits to their name and some of whom have solo exhibitions and publications listed.

I don’t normally bother with collections of the up-and-coming, but China is a different enough place, and I have little enough exposure to its photography, to make this book a worthwhile excursion into the genre.

The book includes a mix of what you might call photography and what you might call camera based art (I don’t want to get into a discussion about the merits of these terms but I think my meaning is reasonably clear). This isn’t a collection of photographs of China, but, as the title makes clear, it is a collection of photographs made in China. The book jacket emphasises the word ‘in’.

My main impression of looking through the book was adolescence. These are young photographers indeed, and the photos contain a heavy mix of the sort of self-obsessed, crude, and banal that you might expect from a similar collection anywhere in the rich world. That is, these young photographers are being normal. This bodes well for the future of China even if it does not suggest much for the future of photography.

China is undergoing such change at the moment it is a great pity that there is so little documentary photography in the collection. One interesting snippet from the interview:

I think there are regional differences: the media seems to have more influence for artists in places like Guangzhou or Shanghai. There the artists’ works tend to be more documentary style which may reflect their day jobs in the media, working for magazines. Whereas in Beijing people might take their position as artists more serious and their works might reflect their ideas of themselves as artists.

From this collection, some of those Beijing based I-am-an-artist types need to get out and find a day job.

I’m not going to give this book either a ‘recomended’ or a ‘not recommended’ tag. I suspect that you will know if it interests you. As a book of photography it isn’t great. As a window onto a fast changing country it is interesting.

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