Ian Teh62Photographing the Price of China’s Progress

In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, British Malaysian documentary photographer Ian Teh talks with Eyeshot about a country that was, for a long time, a mystery to him. Born in Malaysia and raised in a Chinese-Malaysian world, he grew up with roots he barely knew, and in 1995 he finally went to see China for himself, travelling for three months as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms took hold and returning ever since. Largely self-taught, he built his eye in libraries and Magnum annuals and in long conversations with other photographers. Between 1999 and 2008 he photographed the country through its most dramatic years, from the Three Gorges Dam, where around a thousand towns were submerged and 1.4 million people displaced, to the coal industry of Dark Clouds. What recurred in every story were two things: staggering scale, and the migrant workers who carried it. He speaks about photographing progress without celebrating or condemning it, about editing people into silhouettes to make the machine visible and then giving recognition back through portraits, and about why a photograph is strongest when it leaves room for reflection, because the author is only fifty percent of the equation and the viewer is the other half. His new limited-edition book with Eyeshot, Undercurrents, reopens the archive that began his career and reinterprets it from the present.