A reflection on my experience as a photographer in China over some 15 years, written just before a retrospective of my work at the Communication University of China (see ‘Events/Press’) in May 2015.

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It’s May 1st, Labour Day and I’m sitting amongst the grove of walnuts trees in ‘Confucious Square’ on the Communication University of China campus enjoying the Beijing sunshine. It’s a beautiful place, and very quiet with most of the students on holiday.  I’m thinking back to my first visit to China in 2010.

‍ ‍I was invited by the British Council in London to exhibit a short film at an exhibition called ‘UK Innovations, A Festival of Bright Ideas’, in Shanghai Xintiandi.  I was excited by the opportunity, I knew this would be a special trip and I was ready to experience a new culture. I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller, ready to immerse myself in the everyday. I was very lucky, I didn’t just find something new and inspirational, I found someone who would change my life – my future wife.  During that first trip, I quickly escaped from my professional duties at the exhibition hall and we travelled from Shanghai to Suzhou and Beijing: it was a revelation.

Over the following years, as our relationship grew stronger, so did my affection for China, it’s people, places and culture.  Together we travelled to many places on long trips by plane, train and bus, to both popular and more remote destinations

China has been my primary travel destination ever since.  I guess in over 15 years, I’ve travelled to 40 different destinations exploring the culture; people, food, history, art, the cities, the countryside, national parks, small rural areas, and I’ve been welcomed everywhere I’ve been, always hospitality and curiosity.

Of course, the more you travel, beyond the immediate tourist and iconic ‘must see’ destinations, the more you see, the more you learn and understand. I have an unwritten rule of sorts, ‘stay an extra day or two’, when the initial novelty of a place has faded that’s when you really begin to look more closely and experience everything more deeply.

For me, it is the relatively unknown places, the everyday lives; staying with a family on Meizhou island and walking between a religious festival and a local opera taking place at the same time right next to each other; joking with the cast at the stage door entrance, watching parents guide their children, all dressed in bright and colourful traditional costumes, through the mysterious (to me) rites and rituals. I was totally accepted, never questioned, always welcome.  The photographs I’ve taken are an added bonus, a chance to capture these moments. And it is through photography that I have recorded my exploration and my understanding of China

When the opportunity arose to work at Communication University of China, a collaboration with my home university Nottingham Trent, teaching a Masters programme, I didn’t hesitate; this would be an ambition fulfilled and an extension to a career which was coming to an end. Now there would be a new adventure.  Over the past eight years I have worked closely with young people, for whom I have a real affinity, and learned about cultural differences in education, work and play. It was from the students, who came from all parts of the country, that I really began to learn about Chinese culture – not the text book stuff, or the stories we read in the news, but the ordinary tales of the everyday. Friendships were forged and they endured, and I’ve watched these young people grow and  establish career and families; I’m very proud of them.

Over the years then, at first as a traveller with my lovely and ever patient wife, and later as a teacher at Communication University, I’ve learned something about life and living in China, and importantly, something about myself, about acceptance, about generosity, about sharing, about how to enjoy being with people and understanding different ways of life – small lives, meaningful lives.

In that short decade and a half, I’ve witnessed many changes in this country, innovative technological developments, shifts in social behaviour where younger people have a broader more worldly outlook but still a strong love of their motherland, greater mobility both inside the country through the extraordinary developing high-speed rail network and overseas through education and commerce: this is a country that continues to transform itself rapidly, emerging from the shadows to be a prominent cultural player on the world stage. 

Now, just a short walk away across the campus, in the beautiful glass faceted library that towers above ‘Piano Lake’, I await the opening of an exhibition of my photographic work;  a fifteen year retrospective.  This will be the first time I’ve ever shown these images, it is a very personal show of moments, lives, places, and events that I’ve witnessed on so many different journeys across the land. There are few pictures of China’s iconic places and regions – the sites that tourists are immediately attracted to – this is a more nuanced view of the beautiful but remote regions of the northern deserts and lakes, the southern coast and islands; people at work in the street markets of Erenhot, Inner Mongolia and Lanzhou in Gansu; people at play on the island of Gulangyu off Xiamen and in Beijing parks; the stunning landscapes on Zhangye and Yardang, JiuZhaiguo and West Lake, Hangzhou,

It's a vision I hope share more widely when I return to the UK and enhance the growing understanding and friendship between our people. It is an opportunity to reflect on this long journey, which will continue I hope for years to come, an opportunity to explore further and in more intimate detail, China’s, people and places.