 |
 |
|||||||||||||||
 |
Our Brilliant Book Awards 2010 |
|||||||||||||||
Third Prize: Tessa Bunney with 'Yunnan' |
||||||||||||||||
“My first visit to Yunnan province was in April 2008 while I was living in Vietnam; Kunming, its principal city, being just an hour’s flight from Hanoi. After several months in the flat Red River Delta I was longing to see hills and mountains. As Ashley C Givens observes in At Home, Abroad: ‘Today many photographers who shoot in China focus on the enormity of the country’s cities and its fast-paced growth. They want the viewer to be overwhelmed by the vastness of the cityscapes or dismayed by environmental abuses.’ This project, however, is about the people and places left behind in the rush for modernisation and the effects this is having on the countryside. The majority of villagers are subsistence farmers, although money now usually comes in from economic migrants who have left their villages to work in China’s boom towns. The mountainous terrain, poor communications and the isolation of communities have, to some extent, allowed the ethnic groups to preserve their customs and identity. Today, the majority of people wear manufactured western-style clothing, yet one can still see individuals wearing traditional clothing that identifies them with a particular locale and ethnic group, especially older women in rural areas. “This book is a collection of landscapes, interiors and portraits of the people and places of Yunnan as I wandered, using local transport, around the villages from the peaks in the north of the province to the tropics in the south, bordering Vietnam and Laos. It is interspersed with photographs of produce purchased at local markets and pieces of textiles scanned in situ in the women’s homes.” |
||||||||||||||||
• Latest Issue |
||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This website is © 2010 |
||
|
|
|