The images in "Emperor's River" consist of multiple captures, incorporating many moments in time, of scenes which are wider than humanly viewable. They are seamlessly stitched together, to offer temporally and spatially expanded views of their subjects.
Emperor’s River - Photographing Along China’s Grand Canal
Statistics about China’s economic growth abound. It has become the workshop of the world, capable of producing almost anything we can think of. Voracious consumers the world over, with the United States in the lead, drive the demand for these products, incurring historic trade imbalances, while contributing to the uncontrolled consumption of resources, and creating unprecedented levels of pollution.
China’s economic and political power are on the rise, but at the expense of its people who continue to be broadly disempowered. The citizenry is hungry for a modern life, willing at least for now, to make enormous sacrifices to get an economic leg up. There is a sense of pride among regular folk, that China is powerful again, and this persists even though most receive mere crumbs from the spoils of that booming economy.
Sustaining economic power on this scale comes at a heavy price, creating an unquenchable need for electric power, which is met by burning through coal reserves at ever increasing rates, and importing vast quantities of fuel. As a consequence, China’s environment is extremely stressed, with appalling air quality, and contaminated water and soil leading to epidemic levels of cancer, respiratory, and other diseases. This economic expansion also foists dramatic changes onto Chinese society, including massive labor migrations to supply workers to the nation’s factories, which are notorious for difficult working/living conditions. In the course of re-zoning agricultural land for urban use, agrarian communities on the outskirts of expanding cities are summarily relocated, farmers receiving a pittance for their land. Economic disparity is widespread, and the income gap between newly rich party-connected entrepreneurs, and the working population, grows ever wider.
To illustrate this complex story, I followed the Grand Canal, along which this economic expansion is prominently visible. Also known as the Emperor’s River, it stretches over one thousand miles between Beijing, and Hangzhou. Traversing the Yellow, and Yangtze Rivers, it connects cities large and small. The Grand Canal has been a strategic, economic, and cultural engine for over two thousand years, and is credited substantially with China’s former preeminence in the region.
What I found as I traveled was a breathtaking, fast-paced collision of antiquity and modernity, the newly rich vs. the long-suffering poor, and the strangest of bedfellows––unbridled capitalism wrapped in communism. The standard single-frame photograph felt too limited to tackle such a varied subject, so I chose to work panoramically, assembling images out of many overlapping exposures. This approach allowed me to craft expansive, temporally and spatially layered views with multiple fulcrums, resulting in canvases capable of holding the complexities of the scenes I encountered.
These images conflate time, as China itself conflates its past with the future. They illuminate opaque economic statistics in the news, and making visceral how these numbers actually play out on the ground.
Philipp Scholz Rittermann
To view more images:
http://rittermann.com/projects/chinagrandcanal/index.html