Isham Cook's Reviews > CHINA: Portrait of a People

Based on the thumbnail image of the book's cover, even with the hot woman and the tasteful design, and knowing only it was some kind of photographic spread on China, I feared "coffee table book" - or worse, cheesy Chinese variety that would actually mar my coffee table, the sort you can find in the tourist bookshops with washed-out reproductions, incoherent English and sappy token displays of ethnic minorities dancing in their costumes.

The actual book, once in my hands, is unlike any other book I've seen, including those in the photojournalism genre. It has a surprisingly small trim size of only 6 x 6 inches, but at 638 pages and over 2 inches thick and weighing almost 3 pounds, it's not a small book (and probably better suited to hardcover than its fragile paper binding). The weight is legitimated on the inside with the high-quality paper stock and what I'd guess approaches 1,000 high-resolution photo reproductions, capturing the author's two years of traveling to every province of China frequently under spartan and the roughest of conditions. Each province is prefaced with a map and a concisely written pitch, along with beautifully succinct, haiku-like captions for many of the photos, demonstrating that the author's skills as a photographer are matched by appropriate writing talent. The descriptions and the variety of photographic subjects - rural and urban landscapes, ordinary daily objects transfigured by the camera, and lots and lots of unforgettable people - seem to form a narrative that pulls one along the lengthy book, though most readers will probably prefer to dip into it at random than go through the whole thing at one shot. Regardless, it fulfills its evident purpose in being a comprehensive and enticing introduction to the country for people who haven't been to China, and equally interesting as well for those conversant with the country (I myself have lived in China for 13 years).

Now for a more critical angle. The gold standard of "intrepid" or "hardcore" photojournalism books and one that will probably never be equaled is surely American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass by the Dane Jacob Holdt. Holdt arrived in the US in 1971 with $40 in his pocket and spent the next 5 years hitchhiking over 100,000 miles through 48 states and living with 350 families, taking 15,000 photos (selling his blood to buy film) and culling them down to 700 in his book, which are balanced by a substantial and moving narrative of his encounters with the many people he met, delving into their lives with a shocking empathy and intimacy (often sleeping with both women and men to dialogue at the deepest human level), and unflinchingly capturing with his lens the most horrific but sympathetic images of poverty and decrepitude.

Personally, I would like to see the Chinese equivalent of Holdt's book. I suspect Tom Carter may even have witnessed some such darker scenarios or ruder encounters with people and made an understandable strategic decision not to include them, inasmuch as he seems to be positioning his book at the more "polite" end of the photojournalism spectrum, calibrated not to ruffle any feathers in China, where only the positive side of things tends to be presented. Thus he does not refer to himself in the first person but adopts the "objective" reportorial "the author," and when he almost dies during extreme weather on the 5,600-meter Drolma-La pass if it weren't for "a Ngari pilgrim woman" who "appeared as my own private Tibetan goddess of mercy, literally carrying me the remainder of the spiritual circuit," that's all we're told. I want more; I want to hear the dark side of travel and see the underbelly of the country, not just the picture-perfect promotional product. The author is certainly qualified to do this, and I invite him to consider these possibilities for another project.