LUF Member Howard French's Images Featured In The New Yorker

[johnbuckley]

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Evan Osnos, The New Yorker's China correspondent, writes this about Howard French, who many here will know from his participation in the LUF:

 

"The writer who can really shoot—the dream of generations of penny-pinching newspaper editors—is the rarest of creatures. Because I’ve failed at it enough times to know the difference between snapping off a few frames between interviews and really seeing a story, I’ve decided that it demands competing sections of the brain, operating in binary fashion: one on, the other off. Howard French, alas, proves otherwise. After a career in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and Asia, much of it as a bureau chief for the Times, French has published “Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life” a chronicle of five years in Shanghai, with writing by Qiu Xiaolong (and an introduction by Teju Cole). French’s photos are intimate, unadorned, black-and-white. They capture moments at the center of a Chinese city in a way that is faithful to those of us who know these places, without resorting to the usual Porsche-beside-a-donkey images of today’s China. It’s Shanghai, but I prefer the ones that are placeless—the photos with no Chinese script to give them away: the alley portraits and sidewalk scenes that could be Helen Levitt’s New York, where the settlers were from County Cork not Hunan Province, but who wore similar anxieties and aspirations on their faces."

 

He goes on to interview him here: Howard French's Images of Shanghai : The New Yorker

 

Nice going, Howard, and we look forward to buying the book.

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