Stefen Chow

Dear Friend,

I know when I have lived in Beijing long enough. I got into a taxi today, and after chatting for quite a while, the driver, a amiable 30-something turned around and said,
“你不是本地人吧.” （You are not a local, are you?”)
He later said I looked like a Beijinger, sounded like one, but felt later that my vibe was just a tad strange.

13 months in Beijing does make you more local, and I look back at the last year with much nostalgia. I remembered when I first shifted to Beijing, everyone including my wifey and I felt we were taking a big risk. We had little concrete reason to be here, as there was no job offers, few friends and the food oily. I remembered some of my friends snickered when I told them I would just shift my customer base to China, and I will find a way to ‘survive’.

How quickly that has changed. One of the biggest changes I noticed within us is how much more we have come to appreciate China as a whole. I last counted traveling to at least 20 different cities in China for either holidays or work, and I have already been to most corners around the country. I can now differentiate the differences in ascents between the northerners and southerners, cultural differences between people in the big cities and the smaller provinces, how Sichuan food really taste different in Sichuan itself and the challenges and mindset behind the China that is trying to project itself to the rest of the world. I came to China at the beginning only knowing the skylines of Beijing and Shanghai, and now I can tell if that rowdy Chinese group sound like they were from Zhenzhou or Chengdu.

There are still things I can never really get used to in Beijing - heavy secondhand smoke every corner you go, heavy traffic conditions within the Beijing city and that frequent gurgling of spit within the taxi driver as he opens the door in moving traffic to spit that green goo possibly onto an unsuspecting incoming cyclist. However, I must say there is now less of a cultural shock opposed to a grudging acceptance of their styles and habits.

Nowadays, when I do assignments out of the country and encounter Chinese nationals, I feel a certain sense of affinity as I understood their conditions back home and their struggles in a new country. I remembered a few of my assignments consisted of just sitting with them while they relate their challenges with a few smokes between them. My very own great grandfather probably didn’t feel very welcome when he first touched down in Malaysia a hundred years ago, then a tin mining town and an area opposed to new Chinese immigrants.

Now, I can even see why despite having some of the most varied and imaginative cuisine in Singapore and Malaysia (coconut milk with curry and rice noodles anyone?) that befuddles and impresses some of the most traveled world famous chefs, the Chinese national student that comes to Singapore to study would still want their lunch and dinner to consist of hand pulled noodles or meat dumplings. When I was still a student in Singapore, I never truly understand their palate, even to the point of laughing at their lack of trial and error about their diets until I realised this was one of their few moments in a day where they travel back to the comforts of their heritage and feel that they were right at home for that short half an hour. After that, it is back to the non-descript laboratory or homogenous construction site.

I look back in time, and I feel that I made the right choice of jumping into an unknown situation again. Same for climbing that big mountain, same for choosing to be a photographer, same for jumping into New York with crutches and all and back all over again.

Stefen Chow
29th October 2009
Beijing West Train Station
(enroute to Shijiazhuang for an assignment for Bloomberg news)

Update: It is 1st October today, so Happy National Holiday for China! I love you! Back in Beijing now, and just did an interesting assignment on wealth disparity in Shijiazhuang.

Hi all,

I will be giving a talk about my photography in Singapore on the 29th October 2009. I will talk about my recent assignments, my experience moving into the China market, as well as tips on securing long term projects.

Details are as follows.

Date: 29th October 2009, 7pm
Venue: Li Ka Shing Library (level 5), Singapore Management University
RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/lensmaster (This means there are limited seats only!)

Will love to catch up with many of you, and hope to see you there!

Talk SMU 29th OCT Stefen Chow

Stefen
Beijing

I was surfing through the news when this news item hit me.

it was about Christian Ronaldo’s mega transfer to Real Madrid, and this was published on Telegraph, a well known English paper. Except the photo is a fake, a screen grab from a popular soccer game.

More can be seen here.

Fake? or pure imagination?

I was recently featured by thetravelphotographer, and Tewfic was nice enough to pass me a glowing account of my website.

Thanks for the hit, Tewfic, it has been a pleasure.

Stefen

Just got the news.

This is quite sad. I was at the Portfolio magazine office in New York just last October, where I met the new photo editor Karen Frank. I remembered her being a nice lady, and there seemed to be an air of confidence within the office. I am a fan of the magazine, as I felt it struck a good balance between business, travel and leisure issues. It was one of those magazines that in my opinion, deserved to lived a lot longer.

I was keeping my fingers crossed when they first severely downsized portfolio.com, which was their website branch. alas.

AP report
washington post
A personal account from one within

Stefen

I will talk a bit of my family history today. I guarantee it will be pretty interesting, so bear with me while we travel a bit back in time.

I was born into a fourth generation Malaysian Chinese family, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. My first memory of my life was in a big garden, and there were rambutan trees in my backyard, and a big black dog that was kept in a cage whenever I wandered into the garden. I was the youngest boy with two older sisters, and I believe that during then my parents would never imagine that adventure streak in me because I shrieked more than acting manly.

Some of the things that I remembered or reminded by my mother of my early childhood include things like being bullied on my first day of kindergarden, eating part of a cockroach (the rest of the cockroach was still wriggling in my hand), and kicking girls off while hanging on a horizontal bar during my recess break. Ah, the joys of being a boy, and being the youngest I often get attention whatever I do. I was the little rut in the house, and I gleefully strutted my weight around.

One of my more vivid memories was the nice car my grandfather drove. My grandfather, already 60 when I came into the world, seemed like a stern man who seldom played with us. While the rest of my relatives showered attention and made funny faces at me, my memories of him was sitting in a corner and seldom saying a word. All that apprehension towards of a barely smiling figure changed when he prepares to make a trip on his car, and I would jump up and follow him. It didn’t matter where we went, and I was often bored of the destination but it was the journey that truly mattered. I remembered it was an old Mercedes, probably a white one, with pimply leather upholstery and golf tee-like locks on the door. The ride was bumpy, the air con barely enough, the engine rattled, but the experience was cool. It gets even better whenever he was at the top of a slope, he would switch off the engine and let the car ride through the momentum on neutral gear. I only understood later in life he was saving gasoline but during then, I thought he was treating me to a roller coaster ride.

I felt a tad sad that I never knew my grandfather better. I blame it on myself. We seldom talked in depth, and the conversation was rarely that interesting even as I became older. I have heard a lot about him through my father and his siblings, and it was through other peoples’ accounts that I knew my grandfather was a great businessman, eager to help others and yet extremely stingy upon himself. We got into a lively and brief conversation once towards his later years when I was rummaging through his personal safe and found a few of his passports. On the passports, I saw custom stamps from almost every country I knew existed. He had step foot on almost every continent yet he never talks about it, and he barely speaks a word of English or Spanish (He has been to both USA and South America). I showed him the passports and he was rather amused, and asked me to count the number of countries he has been for him. I lost count after the twentieth muddled looking stamp and I never really found out the actual figure.

Last month, I discovered one more piece to the puzzle about my grandfather. Along with my father, his siblings and my wife, we made our maiden trip to Dapu, a village in Guangdong in Southern China. Dapu was the ancestral village of my family, and it was exciting because even for my father who is in his 60s, he has never step foot on it. We were all filled with anticipation because we didn’t really expect what is to be in store. Will we be sorely disappointed, or will this trip allow us to discover a bit about ourselves?

I must say I wasn’t disappointed. As we made the trip to the village, we also managed to reconnect with our long lost relatives. We have about one busload worth of new found relatives spread among living in the village, nearby Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and they all trooped down to meet us. It was a pretty surreal experience, because I have never met them in my life yet there was a certain affinity towards them. All of a sudden, I discovered my Hakka (my dialect group) tongue and started to converse in that dialect. We stayed in the region for a week, and during this time, I discovered a lot more about my family’s history, origins, and our connection in the present future.

Most importantly, this experience all reconnected back to my grandfather.

Most of my faraway relatives had only great things to say about him. They said that times in China for them was difficult for a long time, and my grandfather would always support them in whatever ways. He would ship cooking oil from Malaysia to them during the Cultural Revolution and all through the 1970s, he would send them groceries and necessities to China. He was really the person who remained contact with them through the hard times, and they were very grateful. In the late 1970s, he suggested building a house for them in the village, and it was a grand one.

He bought a plot of land, and started building a house that would accommodate about 20 rooms. During that time, the investment was considered very sizable but my grandfather somehow saw the need to contribute back. He named the house after his father, and it was where we stayed during this trip. The house is three stories high, and it sits on top of a slight hill that allowed a pretty sight of the whole village. Although he didn’t complete the building due to financial set backs during the 1980s recession, he completed the foundation of the first floor and later convinced his other relatives to contribute enough funds to complete the project.

It is certainly one of the grander houses in the village, and it was in China where I witnessed my grandfather’s impact and his contribution to a legacy. He passed away from ill health and old age when I was trying to jumpstart my photographic career in New York in 2007. But it was this trip that did affect my own outlook in life, and I felt closer in spirit to him because of this. I get reminded every time I move down slope on the road, as the act of being thrifty on yourself is really admirable when you are sacrificing and caring for others.

Stefen

It seems that this issue has created quite a stir in the Danish community, and even among the judges where one of them wanted to give an award on how photoshop can be used. 

The photographer in the middle of this, Klavs Bo Christensen, has also spoken up and it is always good to see both sides of the coin. 

When I first made the post, my mind was made up against the photographer. However, after reading his comments, I am still convinced that the photoshop was certainly excessive and likely to be disqualified as an image in such a contest, but he has also been subjected to unfair criticism under the internet spotlight. 

These are some of the photographer’s quotes. 

“In my opinion, a RAW file (RAW, NEF, DNG, CR2, etc..) has nothing to do with reality and I do not think you can judge the finished image and the use of Photoshop by looking at the RAW file”, he says.

“One can for example choose to overexpose his images, making them more saturated in color when you close them down in the RAW converter. It seems to me in line with choosing a specific film to each assignment in the old days”, he says .

“You can also choose to expose after highlights and raise the bottom afterwards or you may choose to shoot in JPEG with the camera ready set to ‘High contrast’ or other fiddlings”,

“What is the task of the judges? Is it to look on our Photoshop or is it to value the photo journalistic content and angle of the story? Pellegrin for example, would not have had a chance in POY with his way of post processing”, he says.

More of the article can be seen here and here

Take some time to read through this. The nice people at photoshelter has condensed a pdf booklet for many of us photographers to optimize our search engines. Through the rather informative and engaging narrative, I discovered a couple of things. 

1. I rank number 5 under google’s search of the keywords ‘China Industrial Photographer’. That is on page 1, and I am rather happy about that.

2. The keyword rank that is stated in the booklet allowed me to draw the conclusion that hardly any people use those keywords to search for those terms in the month of March.

I guess it is back to the drawing board again.  

The link is here

http://pa.photoshelter.com/mkt/seo

Stefen

Photos: Klavs Bo Christensen

I was directed to this link by a Danish photographer friend, and this photojournalist submitted his work for the Press Awards only to be denied by the Danish Press Photography Union for excessive photoshopping.

I guess this is really a case of too much of a good thing. 

More of this issue can be found here. 

online photographer’s take
The Danish article

Stefen

I have been in Beijing for almost 7 months already, but it seems that there is still so much to explore and learn about the place. Beijing can be right at the edge of the what is modern and hip, yet the place’s history bring you back to one of the grandest civilizations of all time. This is a totally cool place, and I am just awed by the scale of the place many a time. 

I am in the midst of doing a project on the Forbidden City, and it has been a gratifying experience so far. This is the synopsis of the project. 

“Imperial China is a series of work inspired by China’s royal legacy. With a vast history spanning across five millennia, it is impossible to represent the whole depth and breadth of Chinese culture simply with any text or symbols. The Forbidden City is a lasting icon of what has brought China forward to this day, as well as what fractured the nation at its weakest. It was the home of 24 emperors over nearly five centuries, a time span that would make our present digital era seem a flicker. 

The work explores the facets of this quintessential China, not just in representing the past but also making sense of how it blends in today’s future. Painting the actual experience with a layer of subtlety, the selective focus hints at the workings of human perception while breathing in our transient existence. With the thread of the color red running throughout the series, the link between present and past is forged.”