Shanghai: The Vigor in the Decay
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/09/24/shanghai-vigor-decay-photographs/
Shanghai: The Vigor in the Decay

All of this is happening in Shanghai—and dozens of cities across China and around the world—but it’s not how Howard French and Qiu Xiaolong tell it in their unusual new book of photographs, poems, and essays, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life. We get no clichéd pictures of a beggar in front of a Louis Vuitton mural, no workers looking uncomprehendingly at a Bentley pulling into a five-star whatever. Instead we are thrust deeply into ordinary people’s lives, into their tiny living rooms with moldy walls and faded curtains. We see them living out on streets of cracked sidewalks and crumbling facades. We watch them sitting and waiting in poses of leisure. The transience and decay tells us that all this is vanishing.

The pictures are mostly portraits of people, some staring at the photographer, others caught in the middle of a laugh or conversation. One shows a woman selling paper money, which mourners burn at graves on certain holidays. The blurred stacks of otherworldly bills rise out in front of her like Shanghai’s new luxury towers, while she glances up, her face uncertain of where she is.

perhaps richer than numerous bankersIn another we are thrust into an elderly woman’s living room, where she sits motionless and expressionless next to a window, a giant character for “happiness” hanging from the ceiling.
in the world, and all in cash,
for the underworld, shadows
and memories lurking around.

with pots, bottles, medicines, ashtraysAll the photos are black and white, emphasizing the grainy but sharp life of Shanghai’s backstreets. In one photo a young boy is sitting on a curb, looking like an old man, every flake of the rotting façade behind him in focus.
(so he will never go hungry,
thirsty, nicotine-craving, or sick),
and an old-fashioned clock ticking
still like his heartbeat…

French also takes us to a room shared by several migrant women caught laughing over a joke or a lover. In the accompanying text, Qiu imagines that inspector Chen has just interviewed them about the murder of one of their friends. The little story reminds us that many of the people left living in the old city are not Shanghainese but poor migrants willing to put up with the cramped conditions. And yet they also remind us of the city’s vigor: the women laugh; they are here to make money and participate in the boom and their aspirations are captured in the fake wedding picture hanging on the wall above them.

Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, photographs by Howard W. French and poems by Qiu Xiaolong, is published by Homa & Sekey Books.
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