Peter Cunningham is a photographer from New York who came first to China to look at the tragic historical issues in Nanjing, but then became fascinated with the introduction of Western advertising techniques in Beijing and Shanghai.  For the last 4 years Peter has co-created projects with Chinese student photographers while teaching “The One Club China Photography Workshop”  in Beijing and Shanghai.

This is the first pf a series of postings about his work in China

I have just finished a draft of a project I call “The River of Change: Cultural Evolution in China”.  You can see it here

Photographs by Peter Cunningham

Photographs by Peter Cunningham

One of the goals of this work is to create a photographic language that communicates in both Chinese and Western culture.  My impression is that many books, websites, films, many kinds of projects are intended to communicate some point about China to the Western audience while others are intended to make points to just a domestic Chinese audience, they are considered separate worlds, too difficult to address simultaneously. 

Laughter, of course works, and abstraction, but words and ideas are difficult; it’s even difficult between individuals with the same language and culture: philosophers and psychiatrists have long discussed the problem of whether we ever really know we are communicating with one another.  But we are now live in a world culture and there is no reason we can’t try to recognize similar things in our parallel human experiences.  It’s my feeling that many of the changes that are going on now in China are similar to changes that come with the modernization everyone has been experiencing around the globe; the timing is different, but the basic dynamic is familiar.  We often think that what we experience in our lives is unique within our family, our community, or in our nation, that outsiders can never understand.  But the fact is, that although the cultures and individuals are very different, there is much we can recognize in one another.

I would like the readers of this new website to let me know what you think about these pictures and words, I would like to know where I fail or succeed in my communication across culture, do you recognize the vision of this American  in China?   As this project evolves, my goal is to develop a single document that can be published for both a Chinese and a Western audience.