This week a story I worked on in Wuhan with back in November came out in Stern magazine in Germany. It’s the cover story of the magazine, written by Philipp Matthias and features the kind of provocative cover that this magazine is becoming known for.
Some might recall an illustration of Trump holding up the severed head of the Statue of Liberty three years ago. This week’s cover of Stern is an illustration of Chinese dragon giving the finger. Stern also found some notoriety with a doctored image of Trump draped in the US flag giving a Nazi salute. As an aside, the fact that the use of fake imagery is so commonplace is depressing to me. Regardless of the message, I think mainstream news magazines shouldn’t be using doctored (fake) images at all - especially ones with such a rich history of photojournalism as Stern, but that’s another matter. I’m always excited to be assigned by a magazine like Stern though - it’s exactly the kind of publication I hoped to work for when I started out trying to make a living from photography about 17 years ago.
I’ve always liked Wuhan. The people are very welcoming and I’m fascinated by the Yangtze River, an incredible force of nature that flows through the city at more than a mile across. Whenever I visit, I’m constantly drawn back to that river, just like many of the city’s residents. Many of of my photos from Wuhan were shot near its banks.
Wuhan, like seemingly all of China has achieved new sort of ‘normal’, having effectively eliminated the virus. It’s strange to read the news from elsewhere and see second and third waves devastating many other countries. Today Wuhan feels close to the city I first visited about six years ago, apart from all the masks and hand sanitiser, although it does somehow feel slightly subdued. One thing that has certainly changed is the skyline. The rate that skyscrapers appear in Chinese cities is dizzying.
A bit more than half photos used in the spread were shot on film with a Pentax 645NII medium format camera, although a couple of shots were shot on a Nikon D850 on an earlier trip to Wuhan two weeks prior for Swedish publication Dagens Nyheter. Some stock photography is also sprinkled around the 11 page spread. The DN story was about Wuhan rebounding from its 76 day lockdown earlier in the year. Incredibly, Melbourne, where I’m from had to weather its own 111 day lockdown.
Philipp’s story has a much broader canvas. It’s not just about post-outbreak life in Wuhan, but about the rise of China. It investigates the premise that if China has emerged a victor in the fight against the virus, then at what cost has the victory been achieved domestically and internationally?
The main reason I was shooting on film is that I like the colours of Fujifilm Pro 400H for portraits especially and it has an amazing tonal range. I usually rate it at 100 or 200 ASA if there’s enough light so I can bring out detail in the darker areas. It’s much easier to retain highlights with professional negative film compared to digital, but there are obvious drawbacks such as cost, having to reload the camera, limited ability in low light and so on.
I did intend to shoot portraits exclusively with medium format film, but I ended up shooting some reportage with it as well. The first opener in the story is actually a stock photo which I haven’t included here, but the second double page spread of a mahjong game in a laneway is mine. I also shot a few rolls of film with a Hasselblad Xpan, but none of them ran. I think the panoramic format of the Xpan is a fairly challenging format for magazine layouts, but 6x4.5 dimensions of the Pentax 645NII I was using is pretty much ideal for magazine work.
Right now things are pretty quiet in Shanghai. To be honest one reason that I’ve lapsed in updating this blog since early October is that I’ve been flat out with work and just didn’t have time. That has now changed as I things wind down before Christmas.
I’d normally be back in Australia for holidays by now, but it’s not really possible for me to travel there since I wouldn’t be able to return to China if I did, my wife wouldn’t be able to come as she’s not an Australian citizen and the cost and availability of flights is prohibitive too. Besides, Vanessa has just started a job at Central Studios, so it’s not like she could waltz off to Melbourne for a few weeks even if the world had not taken a nose dive this year.
So instead of enjoying summer in Melbourne with friends and family I’m just marking time during the week, overseeing a hotel brand video project that’s in post production, cooking, wandering around doing street photography if the winter light is good, going to the gym, playing tennis and as of the last week, seeing off a nasty cold, which is not COVID-19, just a nasty cold.
Anyway, here’s some of the work from Stern along with some outtakes. Also seen here is a ‘workshop’ photo of Philipp and me. We accidentally coordinated our wardrobes with black leather jackets.
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