Results tagged “blackandwhite”

                                                             

A powerful, evocative and sombre collection of photos taken by Shanghai-based Canadian photographer Chad Ingraham who has been spending time in Chengdu and Dujiangyan over the last few days.

A few weeks ago it came to our attention that what appeared to be a large price tag-shaped sign was affixed to the front of a building under construction across the street from Zhongshan Park. The sign was under wraps, but the shape alone was enough to conjure up images of Best Buy and many high school hours spent searching in vain for movies and music that they don't keep in stock. Now despite the fact that Zhongshan Park already has a Gome, Yolo, Suning, and a host of other crappy electronics stores, we couldn't help but get a little nostalgic for the good old days, when buying a print cartridge just meant you had to pick up the box and take it to the register. No red stamps, no getting an attendant to take it out from behind bullet-proof glass, and no waiting around for someone to go find the 'real' product after you've paid and shown your stamp to the requisite three to ten people.

All this month (that would be March), the photography of Hong Kong artist Norm Yip will be on display not on the walls of a fancy-schmancy gallery on Moganshan Road, but on the meandering walls of Shanghai Studio.

The Tokyo-imported concept is this: each presenter at a Pecha Kucha night narrates a slideshow of 20 images — each for 20 seconds — on any topic of their choosing. Last night saw 14 speakers each give a 6 minute 40 seconds presentation on topics from development around the Moganshan district to urban investigation through art.

No, pictured here isn’t the vaunted Apple iPhone, it’s a Meizu M8 … maybe. Meizu? Not exactly a household brand name next to Apple. But for what it's worth, this Chinese manufacturer does make some pretty decent, portable music/video players, seen here. Some have even managed to find their ways to overseas markets. But, not everyone is thrilled with their product, Meizu has caught some flak for what some had considered to be an outright ripoff of iPod's design, though this Shanghaiist wasn't entirely convinced: Just because it's a portable music/video player? Just because it comes in black and white? That was until yesterday.

Virtual China calls MyTshirt.cn "China's Threadless," and yes the design-your-own-T-shirt concept in nothing new (in fact, on its main page MyTshirt.cn links to all the other similar sites it was "inspired" by). But MyTshirt.cn is the only one of those sites in Chinese and, we assume, it is by far the cheapest. You could have a basic T-shirt arrive at your doorstep for as little as 41 kuai.

Thanks to the kind folks at ARCH, the second installment of movie nights at ARCH is going to be this Thursday, and the movie we will be showing is Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's (王家卫) Happy Together, starring Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as gay lovers in Buenos Aires. If you've never witnessed what happens when you cross Christopher Doyle's cinematography with Wong's cinematic sensibilities, we could point you to numerous writings on it. Fans of Wong probably know that there have been critical scholarly books written about this movie as well as full-length auteurist studies of his corpus to date.

Moon River looks like a diner. It feels like a diner. And, most importantly, it tastes like a diner. The people behind this place got the details right -- the black and white tile floors, the red swivel-top stools and even the colorful curly straws. And we love the huge retro neon sign out front -- it's perfect. They've even got a jukebox (the same one they had out in Gubei) but it no longer works, and -- we just learned this -- did you know jukeboxes are technically illegal in China? An old Cultural Revolution law that never came off the books, we were told.

We have told you about the photography of New York Times Shanghai bureau chief Howard W. French before. And now, there is more to report. Howard recently returned from Berlin, where he helped launch his "Disappearing Shanghai" photo exhibit at Zero Gallery. (So, yes -- in addition to writing for arguably the most respected newspaper in the world, he is also an accomplished photographer ... and he's fluent in like 17 different languages. Deal with it.)

The hard working waiters of this city might not get tips, we but we do, from our tips page. One that caught our attention was about a new photographic equipment center at the corner of Lu Ban Lu and Xie Tu Lu. Named Xing Guang Photographic Equipment City (星光摄影器材城）this four story building is located right on the northwest corner of that intersection, next to a Citymart.

A female blogger named Dai Qin (黛秦) has a blog over at Tianya that has attracted the attention of the Chinese blogosphere of late. Dai wears her literary ambitions on her sleeve: the self-styled "Kafka of China" (it's in her blog title and heading), Dai uses her blog to promote her "serious works" of literature, including essays and novels. However, her notoriety is based largely on nudie pictures of herself -- which for the most part, don't reveal much, except for one picture -- a black and white picture of her back, which includes a tantalizing inch of asscrack. And (to continue on in this scatological vein) this is when the shit hit the fan.

This is the caption for the photo above:

Where do you stand in the 021 Bar/Shrock.cn controversy? Shanghaiist has been light on the scene for a while and wasn't there for the height of the drama, but by reviewing the thread linked above you can get the general idea: a run-down bar in the Yangpu district run by some "rock immigrants" from Xiamen, has the support of local favorites San Huang Ji, over-enthusiastically and haphazardly organizes concerts, sometimes announcing bands who later deny that they had been contracted to play.

Shanghaiist first noticed Shanghai Photography (上海摄影) magazine when it first came out sometime in 2004. Since then, we've browsed each new monthly issue whenever we trawl the local bookstores. This month's issue features much of the same combination of local and international photography that makes the magazine unique. Unlike national photography magazines such as China Photography or Popular Photography which have too many pictures of Tibetan children and herons in flight, Shanghai Photography has a bit more of that gritty, urban stuff you hipsters love -- high contrast, moody black and white as well as blurry, neon-bled color shots, arty shots of construction sites, etc. While the color reproduction quality isn't always that great, the strength of the magazine, as mentioned above, is the diversity of photographic styles contained within its pages. Camera wonks looking for technical stuff like camera reviews, and "image quality" dissections would probably do good to consult other magazines. Shanghai Photography also accepts submissions. You can get it at local bookstores (we got ours at the Shaanxi subway station Jifeng [季风] bookstore) for 15 yuan.

We wrote about Thames Town earlier, and it seems that Kristie Lu Stout, armed with her "Shanghai Diary" has taken it upon herself to bore many, many people with her take on what several hundred thousand people have already had their take on. You'll enjoy this:

... And you should be, too. In fact, Shanghaiist has so much time on our hands that, despite cognizance of our own mortality, we surf places like Youtube for cheap laughs. And we're happy to report that we've found some things that might be of interest to you. First there's this video about a Shenzhen Disney factory and how they the workers there are paid miserably (33 RMB a day), are in constant danger of workplace injuries, are yelled at and insulted by their superiors, work from morning until night, and do not have normal social or family lives.

This photo gallery of Chinese coal miners really puts a face on the plight of these laborers. Unsafe work conditions kill them by the hundreds every year. Thirty black and white photos by a Chinese photographer, online monicker k6688, commemorates lives lost in a 2004 coal mine accident in Henan. k6688's photo blog is here (in Chinese).

Chien-Chi Chang has the distinction of being not only a member of Magnum Photos, widely considered the most prestigious photo agency in the world, but also of being the only the only full member of Chinese ancestry (Chang is from Taiwan, a citizen of the US).

Camera conundrums?