The photography of Shanghai's New York Times correspondent

Many of you have likely read some of Howard W. French's writing for the New York Times, but if you haven't checked out his photography, you are missing out. A blog called The Daily Shooter is featuring French's camera work during the month of April. You can read their interview with French here. Lately, French has made the "disappearing Shanghai" -- old neighborhoods that sadly will not be with us much longer -- the focus of his photography. A slideshow of such images called "Shanghai's disappearing old city" can be found at the International Herald Tribune. More of French's photos can be found on his website. French also has a blog and a Flickr page (and he should really start tagging his photos "shanghaiist").

Perhaps soon we will be able to place some of French's photos on our coffee tables. From the Daily Shooter interview:

My hope is to build a sufficient body of work on Shanghai to support a photography book about one of the world's greatest cities and how it is being utterly transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, from a place of very distinctive and almost organic character to a place that will certainly be magnificent and may even inspire awe, but will ultimately be far less distinctive. Almost by definition, the wholesale creation of an ultra-modern city means the replacement of identity with anonymity.

Photo by Howard W. French.