A.K. Nicholas's Reviews > CHINA: Portrait of a People

Tom Carter's visual journey through China allows us to vicariously drink in an immensely diverse culture. The unexpected can be found on almost any page; prostitution in macau, punk hair in Changsha, a beautiful baby in Gongtan, and the mentally ill in Luoyang. I learned a lot about China by looking at it's pages, the presence of Islam, street corner dentists pulling teeth, and other surprises. Normally I would call this a spoiler but there are just so many surprises in this book that I'm barely scratching the surface. There are also plenty of images you would expect: Tibetan monks, Chinese junks, and elderly weather beaten faces. This book is immense and though it is mostly photos, it takes a while to look at all 600 pages of people, villages, cities. I hardly have the vocabulary to describe the range and contrast of subject matter in this book; varied, diverse, encyclopedic, these words don't do it justice. With such a breadth of topics spanning the most populous country, there isn't much room for depth. Each region has a brief introduction and map, each photo has a short caption. But the book is a great leaping off place for anyone who wants to start learning about China through a visual smorgasbord.

The images of people are competently captured in a mostly street documentary style. Carter gets close to his subject, and sometimes their poses are obvious reactions to being photographed, other times they seem oblivious to being recorded. Sometimes the photographer gets up high to give us a birds-eye view of an area of village. Other times he gets in close to his subjects to tell their story.

Having made it through this enormous tome, I find myself picking it up repeatedly and thumbing through it. I keep finding images that I want to look at again, and there are so many that even memorable photos seem like I'm looking at them for the first time.