Firefly Imageworks

The Forbidden City

Well, if you’ve been following along on facebook at all, you know that I just spent nine days in China. I had the pleasure of going alongside the band Offering whom I work with often be it via photography, web design, album design, etc. They have some friends in the Beijing area, and there had been a dialogue about how incredible it would be to come over, play some shows, and even bring Richmond’s Arts in the Alley (one of lead singer Jeanine Guidry‘s varied projects) to a migrant worker community there via connections with Compassion for Migrant Children. Thus, from August 14th through 23rd, myself and a group of eleven others (Offering’s a big band), struck out on a fourteen hour flight to Beijing.

I’ve been thinking a lot since returning on how to digest and share this and the 5000+ photos that resulted. The experience was amazing, simply put, but to talk about why it was always manages to result in a long diatribe that resembles nothing respectful of another person’s time. So I’m breaking it down into a series of blogs: one per day about each day of the trip with twenty or so accompanying photos from that day.

So with the background information out of the way, and format explained, I give you…

Day 1: I’m going to condense the evening of Saturday when we arrived and the following Sunday into one entry here. Saturday evening was your basic land at the airport, travel to a hotel, have dinner, and crash song-and-dance you get on any air travel trip – with the added elements of a world similar to the one you’re used to while being so strikingly different, and the jet-lagg that’s caused by an instantaneous switch of AM to PM (it was a 12-hour time difference). We met some of Jeanine’s friends at the airport and from there they escorted us to our hotel, aided in translation, and even showed us a real, legitimate Chinese restaurant (which could’ve been the Chinese equivalent of Hardeez for all I know, but it was in China and quite ornate, so it felt classy and unique to me). It was here that to my shock I found that the good General Tso – whose armies so often led successful strikes against my hunger – was not a native Chinese resident after all. Dreams. Were. Shattered. Still though, real Chinese food: amazing.

The next day, I woke up bright and early at 5am. I had been tipped off about a local group of people that did early morning Tai Chi in a local park. I grabbed my camera and set out to find them. After a few twisting blocks however, I wandered through a very literal hole-in-the-wall and into a small migrant community. I didn’t know that’s what it was at first though, and when I asked about it later, the best description I could manage was, “It was like a landfill, and people were living in it.” It was my first encounter with the stark difference between people living below and above the poverty line and a foreshadowing of later in the trip.

Later that afternoon, we worked in a bit of good, old fashioned sightseeing in Beijing, visiting Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City (which is anything but forbidden apparently – unless you can’t afford admission). We did the latter first, which was a seemingly endless array of courtyard and palace after courtyard and palace. I wished I’d had the time to travel deeper within its walls, as I’m sure at some point I’d reach the center, but… well… it’s huge. Really huge. Across the highway in front was Tiananmen Square, and it too was enormous. Being the equivalent of walking down Washington DCs Capitol Mall, the landscape was dense with people and littered with national governmental landmarks. We finished the night with food at yet another wonderful Chinese restaurant.

It’s interesting looking back at all the impressions I have. I could talk at length about how jovial the culture of people seemed. How, as a photographer, I started off extremely timid in my photographing these people and places – intimidated by my lack of potentially necessary communication skills – but ended up feeling really comfortable. How odd it was that, for children under three, pants were a completely optional accessory. But like I’ve been trying to say, I’m trying to keep these stories in digestible chunks. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments, via email, or in person! I’m a bigger fan of of a two-way dialogue anyway.