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| The images in Rian Dundon's Changsha present neither the shiny metropolises nor the bucolic villages ubiquitous in Western narratives - but something else altogether. (Photo/ China Daily) |
"For me there's no distinction between work and my social life," Dundon says. "They are the same thing, that's how I work everywhere. I'm not really a photojournalist or a documentary photographer in the classical sense. What I do is more private or personal documentary-style photography. It's all connected for me."
Hershatter, author of The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (2011), advised Dundon on the project while the young man was enrolled in UC Santa Cruz's master of fine arts program in social documentation.
She compares Dundon's work to the early writing of Peter Hessler, whose book Rivertown details his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan province in the 1990s.
"In a similar way, Rian's mode was to be moving through different situations but staying put long enough to actually get to know the people he was documenting," she says.
Most of the images are of Changsha, but Dundon followed his subjects to other cities and provinces, photographing them with their families, doing business or on the road.
The book features short essays, expanded from the journal Dundon kept during his time in China. In one piece, he writes about a restaurant owner who lost his business.
"Zhi Ge is slapping himself across the face, punching the side of his head with a closed fist," Dundon writes.
"In the back of the van are the saddest of salvaged artifacts from the restaurant: notebooks and napkins, a few half-finished bottles of baijiu (white liquor) and Pepsi and a greasy glass table top for the new office he doesn't have a location for yet. Items rescued because Zhi is already onto the next game, already focused on the next opportunity for business.
"He is modern, he is malleable. If the restaurant didn't work out, and funeral consulting isn't proving lucrative enough, he can do something else. There is always something else."
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