Ever since Marco Polo made his almost mythic journey from Venice to Cathay in the 13th century, Westerners have an abiding fascination with China and its otherness. The number of books written and photographed by Western ‘sojourners’ in China over the past several centuries is truly astounding. This tradition of outsiders ‘China watching’ began with the Jesuits in the 16th century and continued with merchants who began taking up residence in Macau and Canton in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were followed by successive waves of other curious visitors: Western diplomats who began arriving in the 18th century; soldiers and traders who began occupying penetrated inland China before the fall of the last dynasty in 1911; scholars and diplomats who congregated in Beijing and merchants and journalists who gathered to Shanghai in the 20s and 30s; geographers, scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers and other kinds of wanderers and adventurers who travelled from Xinjiang to Hainan and Tibet to Manchuria to nearly every corner of China. These intrepid Westerners left behind a whole body of work in almost every European language that ranges from the laughably cultured-bound and superficial to the profound and deeply insightful. What these visitors all shared in common was a restless fascination with the idea of China.


Soon there was a photographic record that began to parallel the written record. The men and women who took pictures were no less absorbed by China than those who wrote books. What is telling in the enormous fund of invaluable visual images they left behind is that it has no counterpart among Chinese in this reverse form. In this sense, these photographs of America by Dong Lin represent something truly unique: a tradition of Chinese beginning to look Westward with the same kind of fascinated but critical eye.


Unlike Dong Lin, who did manage to ‘disappear’ into the underbelly of American society, most ‘foreigners’ in China have never quite been able to dissolve themselves into Chinese society. However, their insolubility only seemed to make them more tenacious to get at the essence of this alien land. Despite its resistance, they prowled cities and the countryside capturing the first photographs of scholar officials, gentry, soldiers, peasants, workers and other ordinary people. Often these images were over anticipated visions of a China that existed more in the eyes of their beholders than in reality. But some of these photographic pioneers also managed to produce hosts of gritty scenes depicting slovenly urban streets, rural poverty, executed prisoners, sing-song girls, street performers, beggars, and starving peasants who proliferated during China’s periodic floods, droughts and famines and times of war.


By chance, the Opium Wars, which opened China up to foreign intrusion, coincided almost exactly with the time that photography was coming technically of age in the West. Two of the first practitioners of this early art whose photographic record remains available to us today were Felix Beato and M. Rossier who arrived in China with the Anglo-French Expeditionary force in 1858- 60. Despite being forced to use enormous bulky cameras, fragile glass plate negatives and sensitive chemicals that required absolutely clean water, these pioneers managed to capture not only the countryside through which the European troops passed, but to record the first photographic scenes of old Beijing even as soldiers sacked the Imperial Summer Palace.


After Beato’s and Rossier’s breakthrough, a succession of other fine British photographers who had taken up residence in the colony of Hong Kong, began making sorties into China itself. Two of the most celebrated are M. Miller and John Thomson. Whereas Beato had focused on Beijing, Miller documented he southern city of Canton while Thomson headed inland to become one of the earliest photographers to capture the heartland of interior China on film. His popular four volume illustrations of China and its People became the most extravagantly illustrated book on China to date. At the same time another photographer. W. Saunders, was staking out a similar territory in Shanghai. He ended up chronicling the rise of this great coastal entrepôt as it came to greatness at the end of the last century.


These pointers represented only the beginning of a long tradition of Western photographers smitten with the task of unraveling the enigma of China for Western viewers. It was a tradition that continued on into the Republican ear with explorers and naturalists like Joseph Rock who in the 20s began publishing photo essays about China’s border regions in such magazines as National Geographic and Life. Then in the 30s and 40s as cameras became more compact and easier to use, an extraordinary group of Magnum photographers came on the scene. Among them was Robert Capa, who was in China in the late thirties as the Japanese invasion began, and Henri Cartier-Bresson who was there in the late 40s just as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was defeated by Mao’s Communists and he was forced to flee to Taiwan. Cartier-Bresson went back again in the late 50s after the People’s Republic was established and left behind some of the most durable images to come out of country this century. Cartier-Bresson and Capa were followed in the 60s by other Magnum contributors, notably Frenchmen Rene Burri and Marc Riboud, who have produced a remarkable record of China since the 1950s.


When China was finally opened to Americans by Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit, a wave of US photographers – including Inge Morath, Eve Arnold, Thomas Hopker, Galen Rowell, Elliot Porter, Jeffery Aaronson, and David and Peter Turnley – became part of this tradition of Westerners observing China. Not only did they have to confront China’s inborn resistance to being observed closely by outsiders, but the Communist Party’s suspiciousness of foreigners, especially emissaries from the capitalist imperialist world.


What is so notable about these different waves of Western writers and photographers that washed up on China’s shores is not just their tenacity to fathom the ‘mystery of China’, but that China produced no comparable cadre of writers and photographers who felt similarly called upon to travel abroad in order to capture the essence of foreign lands for their own home audience. During the 19th century, this absence is partially explainable by China’s insularity and unshakable conviction that it existed at the vortex of world civilization. But even as the 20th century continued and a new class of Chinese became more cosmopolitan and sophist educated, with the exception of a few leading intellectuals like Lin Yutang, Hu Shi, Fei Xiaotong and Xiao Qian – all of whom ventured abroad to study and write a sprinkling of articles and books about what they saw – China produced nothing like the army of prying Westerners that descended on China. Despite the fact that aspects of the West certainly did grip the imaginations of Chinese, especially those reformers who admired its energy, scientific rigorous news and democratic spirit, the West seemed to provoke no where near the same amount of inquisitiveness among Chinese that China did among Westerners. In fact, I am not aware of a single major effort over this past century dedicated to recording life in the US through the eye of a visiting Chinese photographer.


What makes this book of photographs by Dong Lin so pathbreaking is not only the distinctive and artistic quality of his images, but that Dong is really the first serious Chinese photographer of his generation to approach America with the same kind of commitment and creativity that marks those Westerners who have focused on China for so long. In this sense he is truly in the vanguard. By attempting to introduce some telling aspect of America’s enormously complicated but interesting social fabric to Chinese audiences, he has reversed the process described above.


What further distinguishes Dong’s work is that he has gone beneath the surface of banalities that normally occupies visitors to America to explore the dark interior urban life. To do this, he has gone to the streets of US cities to observe for himself one of the seamier sides of life here in his adopted land. To get a fix on America in all its complexity, he has entered that world populated by the homeless, panhandlers, junkies, drifters, transvestites, hookers, bikers and sundry other down-and-outers which is composed of those who have slipped through the cracks of the welfare net and have fallen on the other side of the divide that separates the rich and famous from the poor and unknown.


Coming from a ‘socialist’ country, Dong might easily have approached these castaways with a certain ideological or didactic bias. After all, they do not make a pretty picture, and are certainly damning evidence of the failure of capitalism to deliver for everyone. Instead, he approaches his subjects with a certain neutrality. This is not to say that he is disinterested, but rather that he allows himself to record what he sees free of any prejudice so that the images can speak for themselves. In this sense, he represents the same kind of curiosity that animated those earlier Westerners who were drawn to China not by an urge to make points about different social systems, but simply to record what they saw.


The images here are certainly a far cry from the towering high-rise buildings, limousines and fancy restaurants that are the emblems of the ‘rich and famous’ who reside at the other end of the social spectrum in any capitalist system. While on the surface Dong Lin may seem to be presenting America’s dark side to better portray its weakness, he is actually testifying to one of its singular strengths: that anybody, even an unknown foreign emigrant, is entitled to come here and photograph its most grievous failures without fear of reprisal.


Seeing through an eye that escapes the dichotomies of East and West, socialist and communist, rich and poor, good and bad, Dong Lin is portraying the ‘human’ side life like which resides everywhere among the high as well as the low. What he seems to be saying is that even in the seemingly unjust and ugly there is also a kind of ineffable beauty – a beauty that is simply part of the human dilemma.


Orville Schell
Dean, The Graduate School of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley