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| His images are often dark and desolate, but Dundon says he didn't intend for them to convey hopelessness.(Photo/ China Daily) |
Although his images are often dark and desolate, Dundon didn't intend for them to convey hopelessness.
"I hope that while there is darkness, there's some sense of hope and levity. I tried to balance that. I'm not a documentarian and I don't claim to represent these people, I only purport to represent myself and my own story."
The images can also be viewed as a reflection on the life of a city that in 1938 burned nearly to the ground in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), Hershatter says.
"Often, when people adapt a gritty style of photography, they're showing abject images of human suffering, and that isn't what Rian is doing," she says. "Changsha is an environment that lost 2,000 years of existence in a 20th-century fire, and now on top of that we see layers and layers of destruction and construction that are part of the reform."
"It's a grim, ripped-up landscape. Rian's photos don't beautify it, but they don't make it look miserable, either. For him, it's just the city in which these people live. One of the biggest messages you get from these images is that China isn't uniform."
Dundon's hope is that the book will suggest a more complicated narrative.
"We should be moving away from simplistic interpretations of China," he says. "Photography tells stories you can't put into words, it's particularly good for stories that are undefined. I want to complicate the conversation, because life is messy and complication is a good thing."
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