Tianjin's recent history is volatile and bloody. The front of the Boxer Rebellion, the uprising against foreign influence in the country, the city's legacy in the founding of modern China is strongly held. But the city itself, however, couldn't be more fluid. More fervent to build a great modern urban destination that even Beijing, Tianjin has demolished and rebuilt its entirety, paving over the hutongs that once made a labyrinth of its streets, building highrises and hypermarkets to meet every demand of the wealthy. The city, like many other so-called second- and third-tier cities in China has positioned itself as a global center for international business. Whether the bid will be successful is anybody's guess. The people of Tianjin, however, now have longer commutes, higher prices, and haze to rival the countries industrial centers. In one particularly vivid example of the demolition and construction cycle, pictures below show a former hutong (small residential alleyways that until recently comprised every city in China) broken down to bedrock, flattened into a million little fragments of bricks. Not to worry, though. Tianjin has built a model "Ancient Culture Street" to show what the old city would have looked like. Just as with the antique market, the street is bustling with tourists and locals hoping to get a glimpse of the past that isn't very distant.

While in Montana last month, I spent some time on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation photographing the annual powwow. The Rocky Boy powwow is a long-standing event and some of the Montana’s best dancers are from the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation; it's a huge event, too, drawing contestants and spectators from all over the US and Canada. The community, Montana’s smallest reservation, is also one of the youngest populations in the United States. The area is relatively isolated: it’s 20 miles from Havre, which hardly qualifies as a big city at just under 10,000, and nearly 100 miles to Great Falls, one of Montana’s largest cities at around 60,000. And while the reservation certainly has its problems, there’s hope. The local college seems to have recently been renovated and expanded, the tribe opened a casino which will provide some jobs and money, and the reservation’s infrastructure seems to be constantly improving.

This work will fit in with my ongoing Not Cloudy All Day series on ways of life in Montana.

While in Montana in August, I continued work on my Not Cloudy All Day series about life in Montana. Over the course of the past couple of years, I've been photographing all sorts of aspects of different communities within the state, but I realize that my coverage, like a lot of photography, is skewed unnaturally toward the dour and depressing, the dispossessed and those about to be, the warts of society and their causes and effects. While my work on the Hutterite colony and the Lincoln rodeo are exceptions, the coverage has dealt largely with death, drugs, a faltering economy, and general hopelessness. On recent trips, especially this one, I've been filling in gaps with photographs of ordinary life, celebrations, and the lighter side of life in the Treasure state. Here is a selection of work from the 2008 Montana State Fair (or, perhaps, the Montana Expo...there's been some quarreling in recent memory about whether Billings or Great Falls has the state fair. The Great Falls fairgrounds was renamed from the Montana State Fairgrounds, or something similar to Montana Expo Park. Most people around still call it the Fair or the State Fair.)

Remembering the Rape of Nanking

The Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre reopened to the public on Dec. 13, 2007, the seventieth anniversary of the start of Japanese troops' brutal slaughter of as many as 300,000 in Nanjing, China. The historical account has always been mired in controversy, and differing opinions on what actually happened have been a consistent obstacle to relations between China and Japan. The controversy made new headlines just prior to the grand reopening of the museum after news broke about a prominent Japanese filmmaker's intent to show that the Chinese accounts of the massacre are nothing more than political propaganda. Hollywood has gotten into the mix as well, with big budget productions related to the massacre slated for 2008 and 2009. In a recent bid to improve relations with Tokyo, the Chinese government tried to quell nationalism on the even of the commemoration, but that didn't stop thousands of people from gathering to remember the atrocities of the past.

Earlier this year I partnered with a Nanjing-based charity called the Pfrang Association, which in turn works with the Amity Foundation, China's largest charity. The organization started from a sad situation; the Pfrang family, 2 adults and 3 children, were in their home in Nanjing in 1999 when burglars broke in. Something happened, confrontation and altercation perhaps, and the burglars murdered the entire family. A few months later, a few people were arrested and executed for the crime. The perpetrators were poor, uneducated people from a rural area, driven to desperation by the reality of life in a changing China.

A group of foreigners living in Nanjing at the time decided to start a charity to remember the Pfrang family and to try to address what they felt was the root cause of the crime: inadequate access to education in rural China. The Pfrang Association was born, and, now in its 8th year, the organization continues to provide monetary support to rural children who cannot afford to go to school. The organization sponsors about 150 children, providing all the money needed for books, clothing, boarding, food, and any other costs of living a school-age child might have. Pfrang’s money allows children to go to school instead of being stuck in the rural poverty that affects so many across the country. My work was displayed at a benefit dinner and helped raise more than $20,000 dollars for the effort. You can see more pictures at my archive: Rural Education in China - Jiangsu Province

A massive red tide, a bloom of blue-green algae, is covering the South China Sea off the coast of Qingdao. These photos were taken before the Chinese and international media caught on to the story, and before the bloom reached its peak at 5000 sq kilometers, and I managed to photograph it only because I'd been planning to visit Qingdao in the first place. The algae bloom, common in lakes in the mainland, is rare in the sea and was a potentially massive problem for the 2008 Olympics. Qingdao hosted the open water events for the Beijing Olympics, and only with the help of about 20,000 local "volunteers" was the city able to clear the water in time for the events. A bloom such as this is often caused by a combination of pollution and warm water.
 
You can see more images from this at my photo archive: Qingdao Algae Bloom