Koh Tao

exhausted from diving every day for about ten days here in Koh Tao. did my PADI open water and advanced open water. too bad i have to leave already. so tomorrow an all day trip back to bangkok, then a stop in singapore before i return home, just in time for a family wedding in boston. i only wish i could somehow make time stand still so i could really experience and savor my life. am i too greedy? time stops for no one.

Postcards From China's Industrial Caldron

Postcards From China's Industrial Caldron
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/arts/design/04CHIN.html

BEIJING, Aug. 2 — You cannot just glimpse at Zhou Hai's photographs; the grimy factory workers and miners in them catch your eye and peer into your soul as you are drawn to look into theirs.

The weary faces do not show bitterness, but they do seem to say, "This is the underworld of China's miracle, and I exist."

The scenes in these black-and-white photographs, part of a touring exhibition called "The Unbearable Heaviness of Industry," seem from the Industrial Revolution at its worst. But they are very much part of today's China, where glitzy electronics and the crudest of mechanical industries coexist.

"As our society has developed, so many workers have been marginalized, and fewer and fewer people care about them," Mr. Zhou said last month at the 798 Photo Gallery, appropriately housed in a renovated factory space in northeast Beijing. "So I felt a need to record this era and these people."

"It's a bit like in the Western countries in the 1920's and 1930's," he said. "Some of the scenes are very similar. Our country is now at a similar stage."

Mr. Zhou, 33, who works independently from a base in Beijing, happily acknowledges influences from the great Western photojournalists of the 20th century.

His pictures, in their classical composition, atmospherics and subject matter, have been compared to those of Sebastiใo Salgado, whose work Mr. Zhou admires. (The industrial pictures will travel in January to the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Me., as part of a documentary photography show. They can also be seen on Mr. Zhou's Web site: www.zhouhai .com.)

Some are candid shots. In one, a worker painting the underbelly of a towering structure dangles precariously in a cloud of smoke, the factory grounds just visible hundreds of feet below. In another, workers whose tiredness is palpable eat lunch from plastic cartons, take a smoke or just rest. A lone man, his shoulder pressing against a mass of giant steel girders as he performs some impossible task, takes on Sisyphean stature.

Many of the most haunting images are posed. Black-faced coal miners just emerged from hell, their eyes small points of white, might be deer caught in a headlight. A steel worker's dignity seems to emerge right through the crude mask and goggles he must wear in the fiery, poisonous mill.

"I like posed pictures, with a certain formality," Mr. Zhou said. "By posing, you let them reflect their own state of being, their humanity."

The intimacy of the pictures is no accident. Mr. Zhou said he usually stayed at least two weeks in a location, gradually starting to shoot — he uses a 35-millimeter Leica — as he gets to know the people and place.

"I needed to understand their work and their lives, their inner lives," he said.

Mr. Zhou's newest project should capture China in a broader way. He has been manning a booth in a Beijing train station, where he asks travelers to pose quickly for a shot in front of a plain backdrop. Travelers include business people, migrant workers from the countryside, students and others.

"Each type has different clothing, luggage and expressions," he said. "So I think that together, the photos will capture this era."