Hello.
I just wanted to write and let you know of a new article I've written for The Digital Journalist entitled: "Social Unrest and the 60th Anniversary of the PRC". It talks a bit about some of the trial and tribulations China has been through in the last 18 months and discusses what it might be light trying to cover the 60th Anniversary celebrations in Beijing on October 1st. Article and link are posted below.
LINK: Click Here
TEXT:
Social Unrest and the 60th Anniversary of the PRC
September 2009
by Ryan Pyle
With three weeks to go until China's 60th birthday party on Oct. 1, many of us Middle Kingdom watchers are wondering if China is splitting at its seams prior to its anniversary.
Look back to last March when a group of Tibetans rose up and torched Lhasa, laying waste to shops and killing innocent Chinese migrants from eastern China. The government's response was mass jailing, closing the province to outside observers and journalists and dealing with this "splitist" problem under a veil of secrecy.
Past examples of government control: During the Olympics, big screen television in a small public square posts a message telling people that they will not show the opening ceremonies and that people should not gather in this public space, Aug. 8, 2008. Many watched on their own televisions. The Olympics had caused much fanfare since 2001 when Beijing was officially awarded the games. The city went through many transformations before it was considered ready to host the games.
Just this past July a native Uigur-led protest in Urumqi saw over a thousand protesters ransack businesses and, yet again, kill innocent Chinese migrants from eastern China. The government's response, although there were large numbers of protesters tossed into jails, was much more open. As international photojournalists rushed onto the scene authorities seemed to give them an unusually free hand to report. Will photojournalists now have an easier time working in the country? Had anything changed in the year between the protests to change the government's response? No, in fact, "change" is the wrong vocabulary altogether.
After the two massive riots in regions that cover almost one-third of China's physical territory in which majority Han Chinese migrants were killed, one might think that a change regarding race relations or minority rights would be in order for government officials in Beijing. But alas, all that seems to be on anyone's mind is "social stability" ahead of the 60th anniversary of the PRC.
While China rushes to short-term fixes – the virtual marshal law in Xinjiang and Tibet as well as blocking social networking sites – the government refuses to admit that they have a problem brewing. With a deaf ear on problems "out west," preparations for a momentous military parade, a full-length feature film (on the founding of the PRC) and Olympic-style security are full steam ahead for the Oct. 1 celebrations.
What might one expect in the run-up to the Oct. 1 anniversary? Forget about Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – they have ceased to exist. Visas for everyone, including photojournalists, will be nearly impossible to obtain in September and residents of Beijing will be subject to document checks, police registration and restrictions on movement that were synonymous with the Olympics last August. And, it won't stop there.
Xinjiang has seen a complete Internet blackout. Hotels, residences and even universities have had their access cut; mobile phone text messages have also been blocked in an effort to keep groups from organizing and causing any resemblance of social unrest. The region has been thrown back into the dark ages in order to celebrate 60 years of progress: this is just deeply ironic.
But it is important that you don't walk away from this dispatch thinking that China just has a problem with its minority peoples. In fact, problems run much deeper than that and as China turns 60 it is not taking any chances with issues like freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of information. All this will continue to mean that working freely as a journalist in China will still be difficult.
Will there be an easing of government pressure after the Oct. 1 holiday passes? Most likely, yes. But after watching Iran implode after elections this summer and, more importantly, how Iranians organized themselves online, the Chinese government is more fearful of technology now than it ever has been. The bottom line is that instead of much needed political and legal reforms, what we'll see from the Chinese government after the anniversary is more of the same that will, in turn, lead to more frustration and alienation. And so the vicious circle continues.
Ryan Pyle, an award-winning photojournalist, graduated with a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto in 2001. He realized a lifelong dream and traveled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 Pyle moved to China permanently and began taking freelance assignments in 2004. The next year Pyle, based in Shanghai, became a regular contributor to The New York Times covering China. More recently he has branched out into mostly magazine work for Time, Newsweek, Outside Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Fortune and Der Spiegel.
To see more of Ryan Pyle's images and his blog: http://www.ryanpyle.com
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Another Group Beating
Hello.
There has been a bit of a worrying trend over the last few years of group beatings in China that have led to someone being killed, often women or students. What worries me about this particular story is that technology was avoided, security camera's, and the law was taken in to the hands of a group of store security guards.
Now, for five un-educated security guards (whom are seen as just a step above farmers on the social ladder) seem to have felt that they needed to solve this "suspected robbery" on their own. And that is scary. Even if this woman did shop-lift, which is possible, it makes no sense that punishment for that infraction is death by beating. Where are the police? Where is the law? More importantly where is the respect for the law?
Will this incident just slip in to the past or will there be a proper investigation. In China there are a confusing number of security guards and semi-police officers almost everywhere in China. This confusion comes from basically a "make work" project to keep bored men, often uneducated and from the farm, employed and somewhat happy. But they are not respected and my guess is that they accused this woman of shoplifting and she "talked down to the them" and they beat her to death.
______________________________________
Copywrite: BBC News
Click Here for Story Link
Arrests over China Wal-Mart death
Two Wal-Mart employees have been arrested in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, in connection with the death of a customer, local police say.
Reports say Yu Xiaochun was intercepted and badly beaten by five Wal-Mart security guards who suspected her of shoplifting.
She died in hospital three days after the 30 August beating.
Wal-Mart has confirmed the incident and said it was fully co-operating with the relevant authorities.
Horrific scene
An eyewitness said she saw four or five young men beating the woman a few hundred yards away from the Wal-Mart store, and she had even gone over to tell them off. She said the scene was horrific.
The dead woman's husband told the media that he had found a shopping receipt in his wife's pocket after he got to the scene.
The victim was 37 years old and had a young son.
The police say they are doing all they can to prevent any public anger from fomenting into a so-called 'mass incident'.
______________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
There has been a bit of a worrying trend over the last few years of group beatings in China that have led to someone being killed, often women or students. What worries me about this particular story is that technology was avoided, security camera's, and the law was taken in to the hands of a group of store security guards.
Now, for five un-educated security guards (whom are seen as just a step above farmers on the social ladder) seem to have felt that they needed to solve this "suspected robbery" on their own. And that is scary. Even if this woman did shop-lift, which is possible, it makes no sense that punishment for that infraction is death by beating. Where are the police? Where is the law? More importantly where is the respect for the law?
Will this incident just slip in to the past or will there be a proper investigation. In China there are a confusing number of security guards and semi-police officers almost everywhere in China. This confusion comes from basically a "make work" project to keep bored men, often uneducated and from the farm, employed and somewhat happy. But they are not respected and my guess is that they accused this woman of shoplifting and she "talked down to the them" and they beat her to death.
______________________________________
Copywrite: BBC News
Click Here for Story Link
Arrests over China Wal-Mart death
Two Wal-Mart employees have been arrested in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, in connection with the death of a customer, local police say.
Reports say Yu Xiaochun was intercepted and badly beaten by five Wal-Mart security guards who suspected her of shoplifting.
She died in hospital three days after the 30 August beating.
Wal-Mart has confirmed the incident and said it was fully co-operating with the relevant authorities.
Horrific scene
An eyewitness said she saw four or five young men beating the woman a few hundred yards away from the Wal-Mart store, and she had even gone over to tell them off. She said the scene was horrific.
The dead woman's husband told the media that he had found a shopping receipt in his wife's pocket after he got to the scene.
The victim was 37 years old and had a young son.
The police say they are doing all they can to prevent any public anger from fomenting into a so-called 'mass incident'.
______________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, September 07, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Corbis is Blocked in China
Hello.
This is not exactly breaking news but it appears that Corbis, the global photographic agency, is blocked in China. Now this is a little disturbing on several fronts. First of all Corbis manage my stock archive, and they have done so for about the last 6 years. And because of that I constantly view their website to see how my editor edits the stories I submit and how many images of mine are currently being managed by Corbis; at the moment it is hovering around 1200 images.
My archive and financial well being aside, it is interesting to note that Getty Images, Magnum, VII Photo and just about every other photography agency and collective is not blocked in China. So why Corbis? And whom did they piss off?
It's a confusing game trying to understand why some sites in China are blocked and other are not, but it's a bit concerning that the company that manages my archive is blocked in the world's most populous country, a place where magazine advertising is flourishing and one of the few places in the world that is bucking the downward spiral of the publishing industry.
I don't have much else to say on the issue. I just hope the situation is cleared up at some stage in the future. Maybe China is having a dispute with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who owns Corbis. Does anyone out there have any information to share?
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
This is not exactly breaking news but it appears that Corbis, the global photographic agency, is blocked in China. Now this is a little disturbing on several fronts. First of all Corbis manage my stock archive, and they have done so for about the last 6 years. And because of that I constantly view their website to see how my editor edits the stories I submit and how many images of mine are currently being managed by Corbis; at the moment it is hovering around 1200 images.
My archive and financial well being aside, it is interesting to note that Getty Images, Magnum, VII Photo and just about every other photography agency and collective is not blocked in China. So why Corbis? And whom did they piss off?
It's a confusing game trying to understand why some sites in China are blocked and other are not, but it's a bit concerning that the company that manages my archive is blocked in the world's most populous country, a place where magazine advertising is flourishing and one of the few places in the world that is bucking the downward spiral of the publishing industry.
I don't have much else to say on the issue. I just hope the situation is cleared up at some stage in the future. Maybe China is having a dispute with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who owns Corbis. Does anyone out there have any information to share?
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, September 04, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: The Death of Photojournalism
Hello.
In a bleak article posted in the New York Times a few weeks back, it appears that photojournalism as we know it is dead.....or at least in some form of cardiac arrest.
The story focuses on Gamma a French photojournalism agency that has a long and proud tradition of having photographers in the front lines of many of the world's conflict zones over the last 50 years. While Gamma has now filed for bankruptcy protection it seems that they are as much on their knees from the overall photo market - which is on a sharp decline - and the French labor laws, the latter of which seems to have induced the death blow.
We still live in a visual world and pictures are needed, but spending thousands of dollars sending photographers around the world to shoot in film is quickly becoming a distant memory. Budding photographers, like myself, have opted to base ourselves in interesting parts of the world; in an effort to attract magazines and newspapers to use skilled, and responsible, locally based photographers who have an intimate knowledge of what things are like on the ground. Thereby helping cut the costs, but maintaining the high quality, of producing a photo story. But even this is not enough.
Day rates for image makers, like myself, continue to fall and magazines continually ask me to cut back on my expenses where I can. I oblige where I can but I hope that things can turn around soon, or eventually we'll be working for US$100 per day including expenses; which doesn't exactly fund my already cheap lifestyle.
Some photographers have begun to question the business practices of the magazines and newspapers that are losing money, are they editor heavy? Have they built up a system of salaries and expenses that were funded by printed real estate adverts and personals? Now that this business has migrated online things will have to change, but freelance content producers like myself continue to get squeezed. It's true editors, and loads of full time staff, are being cut and jobs are being lost across the board, a single solution there is not. Even the New York Times, perhaps the most storied newspaper, forced a pay cut across the board and had to fire staff and close overseas bureaus.
We are in the midst of crisis and original reporting and in depth photographic work is suffering. It will be interesting to see how Gamma restructures itself and emerges from bankruptcy protection; but there could be more business failures in the coming months. Maybe my father was right, I should have gone in to banking. It's soulless, but Goldman's second quarter profits where US$3 billion. I can't believe I just said that :). New York Times story is below:
_______________________________
Link to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 10, 2009
Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism
By DAVID JOLLY
PARIS — When photojournalists and their admirers gather in southern France at the end of August for Visa pour l’Image, the annual celebration of their craft, many practitioners may well be wondering how much longer they can scrape by.
Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less-costly fare. Pictures and video snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call it a crisis.
In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of €3 million, or $4.2 million, in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.
Gamma was founded in 1966 by the photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron. With Sygma, Sipa and, earlier, Magnum, it was one of the independent agencies that helped make Paris a world capital for photojournalism, attracting some of the best photographers the field has produced.
A Paris commercial court gave Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to reorganize itself. The company employs 56 people in its Paris headquarters, 14 of them photographers.
Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea, said there would “inevitably” be job cuts to make the agency viable.
“The business model is not working today,” she said. “So without some changes, it won’t work tomorrow.”
“The problem is that news photography is finished,” Ms. Riant said. “Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”
Gamma’s history shows how the market has changed. The agency was acquired in 1999 by Hachette Filipacchi Médias, a unit of Lagardère S.C.A., which bundled it with others to provide photos for its magazine empire. But the business did not prosper, and it was sold in 2007 to Green Recovery, an investment fund that buys and overhauls distressed companies.
Gamma’s rivals have fared little better: Sygma was acquired by Corbis in 1999, and Sipa by Sud Communication in 2001.
Photojournalism, often said to have begun with the American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, experienced a golden age lasting from before World War II through the 1970s. Magazines like Time, Life and Paris Match — and virtually all of the world’s major newspapers — had the budgets to put legions of shooters on the ground in competition for the best pictures.
Today, from the point of view of the news image buyer in a magazine or newspaper, it comes down to a calculation for the photo editor: At a time of shrinking advertising revenue and layoffs, can I afford to send a photographer at a cost of $250 a day or more plus expenses? If not, I may be able to illustrate the story adequately with a “live” photo from one of the newswires or with an archival photo, both options available for a fixed monthly subscription.
“This is not a new trend; it’s the continuation of an old one,” said John G. Morris, a former photo editor whose résumé includes years at The New York Times (which publishes the International Herald Tribune), Life magazine and The Washington Post. “I’m 92 years old, and I’ve survived a lot of crises in photojournalism,” he said. “I find the present situation depressing, but I’m crazy enough to be hopeful. There have never been more images out there, and we need more help in sorting out all the information.”
Eyedea Presse said its problems were compounded by a provision of French labor law that requires agencies take on photographers full-time after using a certain amount of their work, a serious competitive disadvantage when the competition overseas employs a much greater percentage of freelancers.
“We held out as long as we could, but this business model just isn’t viable anymore,” Stéphane Ledoux, the Eyedea chief executive, said after the court hearing. “They’ve killed French photojournalism by requiring the agencies to make salaried employees of the freelancers.”
French photographers acknowledge the problem, but they say agency managers exaggerate it to justify job cuts.
The major newswires — The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, along with regional powerhouses like Kyodo in Japan and Xinhua in China — dominate news photography. But the business of marketing and selling digitized pictures is led by two global companies: Getty Images, founded in 1995, and Corbis, founded in 1989 by the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The stock photo companies rose to prominence by buying up hundreds of image archives and making them available for sale online. While they do continue to sponsor photojournalism — Getty Images employs 130 photographers around the world — the companies are, in effect, services for managing digital property rights.
If Eyedea Presse were to be liquidated, its archives of nearly 33 million images, including those from Gamma, Rapho and Keystone, would be a valuable addition to any of the major players.
At Getty, 70 percent of revenue is generated by the sale of stock images, its chief executive, Jonathan Klein, said by telephone. With the addition of resources it calls on through a partnership with Agence France-Presse, Mr. Klein said the agency was gaining market share at the expense of the newswires.
“Photojournalism means the photographers can tell the story themselves in pictures, and there were places where they could publish those photos,” Mr. Klein said. “In the print world, many, if not most, of those places have since disappeared.”
Still, he said, there are reasons to be optimistic, because “thanks to the Web, there are now billions of pages for photographers to show their work,” he added. “That’s led to more photos being used, but at a lower price point.”
Jean-François Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan for two weeks beginning Aug. 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects — what he called the “disease of the press” — as another problem.
“Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,” he said. When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”
Mr. Leroy said he would advise budding photojournalists to think very carefully about their commitment to the calling. Twenty years ago, a photojournalist made enough money to live on, he said. “I’m not pretending you would get rich, but you were able to live decently,” he said. “That is not the case now.”
Lorenzo Virgili, a veteran photographer in Paris, said the average salary of a freelance photographer was about €1,700 a month, and that unpaid postproduction work on the computer was taking up ever more time.
Some photographers have taken to working for nongovernmental organizations, large institutions or companies to continue doing what they love, Mr. Virgili said. But that arrangement is ultimately unsatisfactory, he said, because “as a journalist you have a professional ethic, and by working for them you risk compromising your neutrality, you lose your independence.”
Ten years ago, Dirck Halstead, who spent 29 years as a White House photographer for Time magazine, wrote in Digital Journalist: “When I speak of photojournalism as being dead, I am talking only about the concept of capturing a single image on a nitrate film plane, for publication in mass media.” Visual storytelling has itself been around since the Stone Age, he noted, and “will only be enhanced” by the changes now taking place.
Revisiting that column last month, Mr. Halstead wrote that, if anything, conditions today were worse than he had predicted. To be a photojournalist today, he wrote, “You have to be crazy.”
“Those people who will do anything to come back with a story will be out there shooting for a long time,” he concluded.
_______________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
In a bleak article posted in the New York Times a few weeks back, it appears that photojournalism as we know it is dead.....or at least in some form of cardiac arrest.
The story focuses on Gamma a French photojournalism agency that has a long and proud tradition of having photographers in the front lines of many of the world's conflict zones over the last 50 years. While Gamma has now filed for bankruptcy protection it seems that they are as much on their knees from the overall photo market - which is on a sharp decline - and the French labor laws, the latter of which seems to have induced the death blow.
We still live in a visual world and pictures are needed, but spending thousands of dollars sending photographers around the world to shoot in film is quickly becoming a distant memory. Budding photographers, like myself, have opted to base ourselves in interesting parts of the world; in an effort to attract magazines and newspapers to use skilled, and responsible, locally based photographers who have an intimate knowledge of what things are like on the ground. Thereby helping cut the costs, but maintaining the high quality, of producing a photo story. But even this is not enough.
Day rates for image makers, like myself, continue to fall and magazines continually ask me to cut back on my expenses where I can. I oblige where I can but I hope that things can turn around soon, or eventually we'll be working for US$100 per day including expenses; which doesn't exactly fund my already cheap lifestyle.
Some photographers have begun to question the business practices of the magazines and newspapers that are losing money, are they editor heavy? Have they built up a system of salaries and expenses that were funded by printed real estate adverts and personals? Now that this business has migrated online things will have to change, but freelance content producers like myself continue to get squeezed. It's true editors, and loads of full time staff, are being cut and jobs are being lost across the board, a single solution there is not. Even the New York Times, perhaps the most storied newspaper, forced a pay cut across the board and had to fire staff and close overseas bureaus.
We are in the midst of crisis and original reporting and in depth photographic work is suffering. It will be interesting to see how Gamma restructures itself and emerges from bankruptcy protection; but there could be more business failures in the coming months. Maybe my father was right, I should have gone in to banking. It's soulless, but Goldman's second quarter profits where US$3 billion. I can't believe I just said that :). New York Times story is below:
_______________________________
Link to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 10, 2009
Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism
By DAVID JOLLY
PARIS — When photojournalists and their admirers gather in southern France at the end of August for Visa pour l’Image, the annual celebration of their craft, many practitioners may well be wondering how much longer they can scrape by.
Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less-costly fare. Pictures and video snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call it a crisis.
In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of €3 million, or $4.2 million, in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.
Gamma was founded in 1966 by the photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron. With Sygma, Sipa and, earlier, Magnum, it was one of the independent agencies that helped make Paris a world capital for photojournalism, attracting some of the best photographers the field has produced.
A Paris commercial court gave Gamma’s owner, Eyedea Presse, six months to reorganize itself. The company employs 56 people in its Paris headquarters, 14 of them photographers.
Olivia Riant, a spokeswoman for Eyedea, said there would “inevitably” be job cuts to make the agency viable.
“The business model is not working today,” she said. “So without some changes, it won’t work tomorrow.”
“The problem is that news photography is finished,” Ms. Riant said. “Gamma wants to go back to magazines and newsmagazines. We will stop covering daily news events to more deeply cover issues.”
Gamma’s history shows how the market has changed. The agency was acquired in 1999 by Hachette Filipacchi Médias, a unit of Lagardère S.C.A., which bundled it with others to provide photos for its magazine empire. But the business did not prosper, and it was sold in 2007 to Green Recovery, an investment fund that buys and overhauls distressed companies.
Gamma’s rivals have fared little better: Sygma was acquired by Corbis in 1999, and Sipa by Sud Communication in 2001.
Photojournalism, often said to have begun with the American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, experienced a golden age lasting from before World War II through the 1970s. Magazines like Time, Life and Paris Match — and virtually all of the world’s major newspapers — had the budgets to put legions of shooters on the ground in competition for the best pictures.
Today, from the point of view of the news image buyer in a magazine or newspaper, it comes down to a calculation for the photo editor: At a time of shrinking advertising revenue and layoffs, can I afford to send a photographer at a cost of $250 a day or more plus expenses? If not, I may be able to illustrate the story adequately with a “live” photo from one of the newswires or with an archival photo, both options available for a fixed monthly subscription.
“This is not a new trend; it’s the continuation of an old one,” said John G. Morris, a former photo editor whose résumé includes years at The New York Times (which publishes the International Herald Tribune), Life magazine and The Washington Post. “I’m 92 years old, and I’ve survived a lot of crises in photojournalism,” he said. “I find the present situation depressing, but I’m crazy enough to be hopeful. There have never been more images out there, and we need more help in sorting out all the information.”
Eyedea Presse said its problems were compounded by a provision of French labor law that requires agencies take on photographers full-time after using a certain amount of their work, a serious competitive disadvantage when the competition overseas employs a much greater percentage of freelancers.
“We held out as long as we could, but this business model just isn’t viable anymore,” Stéphane Ledoux, the Eyedea chief executive, said after the court hearing. “They’ve killed French photojournalism by requiring the agencies to make salaried employees of the freelancers.”
French photographers acknowledge the problem, but they say agency managers exaggerate it to justify job cuts.
The major newswires — The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, along with regional powerhouses like Kyodo in Japan and Xinhua in China — dominate news photography. But the business of marketing and selling digitized pictures is led by two global companies: Getty Images, founded in 1995, and Corbis, founded in 1989 by the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The stock photo companies rose to prominence by buying up hundreds of image archives and making them available for sale online. While they do continue to sponsor photojournalism — Getty Images employs 130 photographers around the world — the companies are, in effect, services for managing digital property rights.
If Eyedea Presse were to be liquidated, its archives of nearly 33 million images, including those from Gamma, Rapho and Keystone, would be a valuable addition to any of the major players.
At Getty, 70 percent of revenue is generated by the sale of stock images, its chief executive, Jonathan Klein, said by telephone. With the addition of resources it calls on through a partnership with Agence France-Presse, Mr. Klein said the agency was gaining market share at the expense of the newswires.
“Photojournalism means the photographers can tell the story themselves in pictures, and there were places where they could publish those photos,” Mr. Klein said. “In the print world, many, if not most, of those places have since disappeared.”
Still, he said, there are reasons to be optimistic, because “thanks to the Web, there are now billions of pages for photographers to show their work,” he added. “That’s led to more photos being used, but at a lower price point.”
Jean-François Leroy, organizer of the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, which runs in Perpignan for two weeks beginning Aug. 29, pointed to a declining emphasis in the media on serious subjects — what he called the “disease of the press” — as another problem.
“Photographers are producing plenty of great stuff, but now the media seem interested only in celebrities,” he said. When Michael Jackson died, it wasn’t part of the news, it was the news. How many photographs of his funeral did we really need?”
Mr. Leroy said he would advise budding photojournalists to think very carefully about their commitment to the calling. Twenty years ago, a photojournalist made enough money to live on, he said. “I’m not pretending you would get rich, but you were able to live decently,” he said. “That is not the case now.”
Lorenzo Virgili, a veteran photographer in Paris, said the average salary of a freelance photographer was about €1,700 a month, and that unpaid postproduction work on the computer was taking up ever more time.
Some photographers have taken to working for nongovernmental organizations, large institutions or companies to continue doing what they love, Mr. Virgili said. But that arrangement is ultimately unsatisfactory, he said, because “as a journalist you have a professional ethic, and by working for them you risk compromising your neutrality, you lose your independence.”
Ten years ago, Dirck Halstead, who spent 29 years as a White House photographer for Time magazine, wrote in Digital Journalist: “When I speak of photojournalism as being dead, I am talking only about the concept of capturing a single image on a nitrate film plane, for publication in mass media.” Visual storytelling has itself been around since the Stone Age, he noted, and “will only be enhanced” by the changes now taking place.
Revisiting that column last month, Mr. Halstead wrote that, if anything, conditions today were worse than he had predicted. To be a photojournalist today, he wrote, “You have to be crazy.”
“Those people who will do anything to come back with a story will be out there shooting for a long time,” he concluded.
_______________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Outside Magazine "Toughest Shot"
Hello.
I just wanted to write and say that I'm very honored to be included in this years: Outside Magazine "Toughest Shot Issue". While I am not exactly sure that my work was as "tough" as some of the other photographers images, I am excited to be included on their list. And just so you know, Christopher Anderson almost drowned on a boat full of Hatian immigrants to get his shot, I only had to walk for a couple of days at altitude; seems I'm on the soft side of the list. :)
LINK: Click Here
Other notable photographers included are:
Paolo Marchesi | Nicky Bonne | Camille Seaman | Jason Florio | Jeff Hutchens | Ryan Pyle | John Huet | Philipp Engelhorn | Christopher LaMarca | Joshua Paul | Matthieu Paley | Mark Fisher | Chris Anderson | Antonin Kratochvil
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Social Unrest & The 60th Anniversary of the PRC
Hello.
With four weeks to go until China’s 60th birthday party many of us Middle Kingdom watchers are wondering if China is splitting at its seams prior to its 60th anniversary party?
Looking back to last March when a group of Tibetans rose up and torched Lhasa, laying waste to shops and killing innocent Chinese migrants from eastern China. The government’s response was mass jailings, close the province to outside observers and deal with this “splitist’” problem under a veil of secrecy.
Just this past July a Uygur led protest in Urumqi saw over a thousand protesters ransack businesses and, yet again, kill innocent Chinese migrants from eastern China. The government’s response, although there were large numbers tossed in jails, was much more open as international observers rushed on to the scene authorities seemed to give them an unusually free hand to report. Had anything changed in the year between the protests to change the government’s response? No. In fact, change is the wrong vocabulary all together.
After two massive riots, in which majority Han Chinese migrants were killed, in regions that cover almost 1/3 of China’s physical territory, one might think that a change regarding race relations or minority rights would be in order for government officials in Beijing. But alas, all that seems to be on anyone’s mind is “social stability” ahead of the 60th Anniversary of the PRC.
While China rushes to short-term fixes: the virtual marshal law in Xinjiang and Tibet as well as blocking social networking sites, the government refuses to admit that they have a problem brewing. And with a deaf ear on problems “out west”, preparations are full steam ahead for a momentous military parade, a full-length feature film (on the founding of the PRC) and Olympic style security is already in full swing for the October 1st celebrations.
What might one expect in the run up to the October 1st anniversary? Forget about Facebook, Youtube and Twitter; they cease to exist. Visas will be near impossible to obtain in September and residents of Beijing will be subject to document checks, police registration and restrictions on movement that were synonymous with the Olympics last August. And it won’t stop there.
Xinjiang has seen a complete Internet blackout. Hotels, residences and even universities have had their access cut; mobile phone text messages have also been blocked in an effort to keep groups from organizing and causing any resemblance of social unrest. The region has been thrown back in to the dark ages in order to celebrate sixty years of progress; that just smacks of irony.
But it is important that you don’t walk away from this editorial thinking that China just has a problem with its minority peoples. In fact, problems run much deeper than that, and as China turns sixty it is not taking any chances with issues like freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of information. Human rights doesn’t seem to be an area of tolerance either as painfully indicated by the arrest of a human rights lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, on trumped up tax evasion charges for which he is likely to receive a seven year jail term.
Will there be an easing of government pressure after the October 1st holiday passes? Most likely yes. But after watching Iran implode after elections in summer, and more importantly how Iranians organized themselves online, the Chinese government is more fearful of technology now than it ever has been. The bottom line is that instead of much needed political and legal reforms, what we’ll see from the Chinese government after the anniversary is more of the same; which will in turn lead to more frustration and alienation. And so the vicious circle continues.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, August 31, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Poll "Prostitutes Trusted"
Hello.
A recent online survey in China ranked Prostitutes as more trustworthy than Politicians. Without getting in to the nitty gritty, the least trusted category includes: real estate developers, agents, secretaries, entertainers and directors.
The article is pasted below.
Copy Write BBC World
________________________
Politicians were deemed less trustworthy than prostitutes
China's prostitutes are better-trusted than its politicians and scientists, according to an online survey published by Insight China magazine.
The survey found that 7.9% of respondents considered sex workers to be trustworthy, placing them third behind farmers and religious workers.
"A list like this is at the same time surprising and embarrassing," said an editorial in the state-run China Daily.
Politicians were far down the list, closer to scientists and teachers.
Insight China polled 3,376 Chinese citizens in June and July this year.
"The sex workers' unexpected prominence on this list of honour... is indeed unusual," said the China Daily editorial.
"At least [the scientists and officials] have not slid into the least credible category which consists of real estate developers, secretaries, agents, entertainers and directors," the editorial said.
Soldiers came in fourth place.
________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
A recent online survey in China ranked Prostitutes as more trustworthy than Politicians. Without getting in to the nitty gritty, the least trusted category includes: real estate developers, agents, secretaries, entertainers and directors.
The article is pasted below.
Copy Write BBC World
________________________
Politicians were deemed less trustworthy than prostitutes
China's prostitutes are better-trusted than its politicians and scientists, according to an online survey published by Insight China magazine.
The survey found that 7.9% of respondents considered sex workers to be trustworthy, placing them third behind farmers and religious workers.
"A list like this is at the same time surprising and embarrassing," said an editorial in the state-run China Daily.
Politicians were far down the list, closer to scientists and teachers.
Insight China polled 3,376 Chinese citizens in June and July this year.
"The sex workers' unexpected prominence on this list of honour... is indeed unusual," said the China Daily editorial.
"At least [the scientists and officials] have not slid into the least credible category which consists of real estate developers, secretaries, agents, entertainers and directors," the editorial said.
Soldiers came in fourth place.
________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, August 28, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: China's Western Gold Rush
Hello.
I had a gallery exhibition a few weeks back on Chinese Turkistan, or China's remote Western Xinjiang province. The area is dotted with oil, mineral reserves and some of the most beautiful natural beauty of any place I've ever been before.
Prior to the reception I gave a 30 minute lecture on the region and my work there. During that lecture someone in the audience asked me a great question: Why are Han Chinese migrants moving in such vast numbers to Xinjiang province and what kinds of work are they doing there?
The question was a good one and I responded with a few personal stories that I had come across: for example the man from Wenzhou who has lived in Korla for 10 years and started out selling refrigerators and is now a multi-millionaire selling drill bits to the oil companies. While that is an extreme example it is interesting to note that the trickle down effect of China opening up the province of Xinjiang is mostly benefiting the Chinese migrants who move west to set up shop. And migrants have been moving west for decades. Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times writes a great piece about the town of Shihezi, an almost entirely Han city. Andrew's story is below:
___________________________________________
LINK to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 7, 2009
Migrants to China’s West Bask in Prosperity
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHIHEZI, China — They marched through the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and countless small towns propelled by patriotic cheers and thumping drums. It was 1956, and Mao Zedong was calling on China’s youth to “open up the west,” the vast borderland known as Xinjiang that for centuries had defied subjugation.
After a monthlong journey by train and open-air truck, thousands arrived at this Gobi Desert army outpost to find that the factory jobs, hot baths and telephones in every house were nothing but empty promises to lure them to a faraway land.
“We lived in holes in the ground, and all we did night and day was hard labor,” recalled Han Zuxue, a sun-creased 72-year-old who was a teenager when he left his home in eastern Henan Province. “At first we cried every day but over time we forgot our sadness.”
More than five decades of toil later, men and women like Mr. Han have helped transform Shihezi into a tree-shaded, bustling oasis whose canned tomatoes, fiery grain alcohol and enormous cotton yields are famous throughout China.
This city of 650,000 is a showcase of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a uniquely Chinese conglomerate of farms and factories that were created by decommissioned Red Army soldiers at the end of the civil war.
“Put your weapons aside and pick up the tools of construction,” one popular slogan went. “Develop Xinjiang, defend the nation’s borders and protect social stability.”
With a total population of 2.6 million, 95 percent of it ethnic Han Chinese, Shihezi and a string of other settlements created by the military are stable strongholds in a region whose majority non-Han populace has often been unhappy under Beijing’s rule. Last month, that discontent showed itself during vicious ethnic rioting that claimed 197 lives in Urumqi, the regional capital, which is a two-hour drive away.
The government says that most of the dead were Han Chinese bludgeoned by mobs of Uighurs, Muslims of Turkish ancestry whose presence in Xinjiang has been steadily diluted by migration from China’s densely populated east.
“Ever since we arrived they’ve resented us and had no appreciation for how we’ve improved this place,” said He Zhenjie, 76, who has spent his adult life leveling sand dunes, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. “But we’re here to stay. The Uighurs will never wrest Xinjiang away.”
Even if many Uighurs view the settlers as nothing more than Chinese colonists, many Chinese consider the bingtuan, meaning soldier corps, a major success. In one fell swoop Mao deployed 200,000 idle soldiers to help develop and occupy a resource-rich, politically strategic region bordering India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, a onetime ally turned menace.
Shihezi and other bingtuan settlements quickly became self-sufficient, a relief to a government lacking resources, and its “reclamation warriors” worked without pay those first few years, steadily turning thousands of acres of inhospitable scrubland into some of the country’s most fertile terrain.
With an annual output of goods and services of $7 billion, the settlements run by the bingtuan include five cities, 180 farming communities and 1,000 companies. They also report directly to Beijing and run their own courts, colleges and newspapers.
“During peaceful times, they are a force for development, but if anything urgent happens, they will step out and maintain social stability and combat the separatists,” said Li Sheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former bingtuan member who writes about the region’s history.
In those early years, the ranks of the bingtuan were fortified by petty criminals, former prisoners of war, prostitutes and intellectuals, all sent west for “re-education.” During the mid-1950s, 40,000 young women were lured to Xinjiang with promises of the good life: they arrived to discover their main purpose was to relieve the loneliness of the male pioneers and cement the region’s Han presence through their progeny.
Demographics have always been a tactical element of the campaign to pacify the region. In 1949, when the Communists declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there were just 300,000 Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Today, the number of Han has grown to 7.5 million, just over 40 percent of the region’s population. The percentage of Uighurs has fallen to 45 percent, or about 8.3 million.
Their grievances have multiplied even as Xinjiang has grown more prosperous, thanks in part to its huge reserves of natural gas, oil and minerals. Many Uighurs complain about the repression of their Islamic faith, official policies that marginalize their language and a lack of job opportunities, especially at government bureaus and inside the bingtuan.
During a recent visit to Shihezi, armed paramilitary policemen stopped every car and bus entering the city. But only Uighurs were made to step out of vehicles for identification checks and searches.
Neatly laid out on a grid, its sidewalks graced by apple trees and elms, the city is populated by the sturdy and defiantly proud who think of Xinjiang as China’s version of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine undergirding the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. But just beneath the self-satisfaction runs a deep vein of bitterness, especially among those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I thought I was going to be a nurse, but I ended up sweeping the streets and cleaning toilets,” said Yue Caiying, who moved here in 1963, and, like many of those with an education, was forced to set aside personal ambition.
Lu Yiping, an author who spent five years interviewing women trucked into Xinjiang from Hunan Province, tells of girls lured with promises of Russian-language classes and textile-mill jobs. In an interview published online, he told the story of arriving women greeted by Wang Zhen, the famously hard-line general who helped tame the region. “Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang,” he quoted Mr. Wang as telling the women.
Still, for many early settlers, Xinjiang offered an escape from the deprivation that stalked many rural areas between 1959 and 1962, when Mao’s disastrous attempt to start up China’s industrialization led to famine that killed millions.
Early settlers like Ma Xianwu, who arrived here in 1951 and helped dig the first thatch-covered pits that served as shelter, offer a typical mix of conflicted emotions. He expressed wonder at the city he had helped create, but also sorrow over the hardship he and others had endured.
“People would lose ears and toes to frostbite,” said Mr. Ma, who is 94 and nearly toothless.
But any sense of bitterness has faded. “We were serving the motherland,” he said, waving off the adulation of a visitor. “The glory belongs to the party. I’m just one drop of water in the ocean.”
___________________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
I had a gallery exhibition a few weeks back on Chinese Turkistan, or China's remote Western Xinjiang province. The area is dotted with oil, mineral reserves and some of the most beautiful natural beauty of any place I've ever been before.
Prior to the reception I gave a 30 minute lecture on the region and my work there. During that lecture someone in the audience asked me a great question: Why are Han Chinese migrants moving in such vast numbers to Xinjiang province and what kinds of work are they doing there?
The question was a good one and I responded with a few personal stories that I had come across: for example the man from Wenzhou who has lived in Korla for 10 years and started out selling refrigerators and is now a multi-millionaire selling drill bits to the oil companies. While that is an extreme example it is interesting to note that the trickle down effect of China opening up the province of Xinjiang is mostly benefiting the Chinese migrants who move west to set up shop. And migrants have been moving west for decades. Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times writes a great piece about the town of Shihezi, an almost entirely Han city. Andrew's story is below:
___________________________________________
LINK to Story: CLICK HERE
Copy Write: New York Times
August 7, 2009
Migrants to China’s West Bask in Prosperity
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHIHEZI, China — They marched through the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and countless small towns propelled by patriotic cheers and thumping drums. It was 1956, and Mao Zedong was calling on China’s youth to “open up the west,” the vast borderland known as Xinjiang that for centuries had defied subjugation.
After a monthlong journey by train and open-air truck, thousands arrived at this Gobi Desert army outpost to find that the factory jobs, hot baths and telephones in every house were nothing but empty promises to lure them to a faraway land.
“We lived in holes in the ground, and all we did night and day was hard labor,” recalled Han Zuxue, a sun-creased 72-year-old who was a teenager when he left his home in eastern Henan Province. “At first we cried every day but over time we forgot our sadness.”
More than five decades of toil later, men and women like Mr. Han have helped transform Shihezi into a tree-shaded, bustling oasis whose canned tomatoes, fiery grain alcohol and enormous cotton yields are famous throughout China.
This city of 650,000 is a showcase of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a uniquely Chinese conglomerate of farms and factories that were created by decommissioned Red Army soldiers at the end of the civil war.
“Put your weapons aside and pick up the tools of construction,” one popular slogan went. “Develop Xinjiang, defend the nation’s borders and protect social stability.”
With a total population of 2.6 million, 95 percent of it ethnic Han Chinese, Shihezi and a string of other settlements created by the military are stable strongholds in a region whose majority non-Han populace has often been unhappy under Beijing’s rule. Last month, that discontent showed itself during vicious ethnic rioting that claimed 197 lives in Urumqi, the regional capital, which is a two-hour drive away.
The government says that most of the dead were Han Chinese bludgeoned by mobs of Uighurs, Muslims of Turkish ancestry whose presence in Xinjiang has been steadily diluted by migration from China’s densely populated east.
“Ever since we arrived they’ve resented us and had no appreciation for how we’ve improved this place,” said He Zhenjie, 76, who has spent his adult life leveling sand dunes, planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. “But we’re here to stay. The Uighurs will never wrest Xinjiang away.”
Even if many Uighurs view the settlers as nothing more than Chinese colonists, many Chinese consider the bingtuan, meaning soldier corps, a major success. In one fell swoop Mao deployed 200,000 idle soldiers to help develop and occupy a resource-rich, politically strategic region bordering India, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, a onetime ally turned menace.
Shihezi and other bingtuan settlements quickly became self-sufficient, a relief to a government lacking resources, and its “reclamation warriors” worked without pay those first few years, steadily turning thousands of acres of inhospitable scrubland into some of the country’s most fertile terrain.
With an annual output of goods and services of $7 billion, the settlements run by the bingtuan include five cities, 180 farming communities and 1,000 companies. They also report directly to Beijing and run their own courts, colleges and newspapers.
“During peaceful times, they are a force for development, but if anything urgent happens, they will step out and maintain social stability and combat the separatists,” said Li Sheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a former bingtuan member who writes about the region’s history.
In those early years, the ranks of the bingtuan were fortified by petty criminals, former prisoners of war, prostitutes and intellectuals, all sent west for “re-education.” During the mid-1950s, 40,000 young women were lured to Xinjiang with promises of the good life: they arrived to discover their main purpose was to relieve the loneliness of the male pioneers and cement the region’s Han presence through their progeny.
Demographics have always been a tactical element of the campaign to pacify the region. In 1949, when the Communists declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there were just 300,000 Han Chinese in Xinjiang. Today, the number of Han has grown to 7.5 million, just over 40 percent of the region’s population. The percentage of Uighurs has fallen to 45 percent, or about 8.3 million.
Their grievances have multiplied even as Xinjiang has grown more prosperous, thanks in part to its huge reserves of natural gas, oil and minerals. Many Uighurs complain about the repression of their Islamic faith, official policies that marginalize their language and a lack of job opportunities, especially at government bureaus and inside the bingtuan.
During a recent visit to Shihezi, armed paramilitary policemen stopped every car and bus entering the city. But only Uighurs were made to step out of vehicles for identification checks and searches.
Neatly laid out on a grid, its sidewalks graced by apple trees and elms, the city is populated by the sturdy and defiantly proud who think of Xinjiang as China’s version of Manifest Destiny, the doctrine undergirding the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. But just beneath the self-satisfaction runs a deep vein of bitterness, especially among those who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I thought I was going to be a nurse, but I ended up sweeping the streets and cleaning toilets,” said Yue Caiying, who moved here in 1963, and, like many of those with an education, was forced to set aside personal ambition.
Lu Yiping, an author who spent five years interviewing women trucked into Xinjiang from Hunan Province, tells of girls lured with promises of Russian-language classes and textile-mill jobs. In an interview published online, he told the story of arriving women greeted by Wang Zhen, the famously hard-line general who helped tame the region. “Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang,” he quoted Mr. Wang as telling the women.
Still, for many early settlers, Xinjiang offered an escape from the deprivation that stalked many rural areas between 1959 and 1962, when Mao’s disastrous attempt to start up China’s industrialization led to famine that killed millions.
Early settlers like Ma Xianwu, who arrived here in 1951 and helped dig the first thatch-covered pits that served as shelter, offer a typical mix of conflicted emotions. He expressed wonder at the city he had helped create, but also sorrow over the hardship he and others had endured.
“People would lose ears and toes to frostbite,” said Mr. Ma, who is 94 and nearly toothless.
But any sense of bitterness has faded. “We were serving the motherland,” he said, waving off the adulation of a visitor. “The glory belongs to the party. I’m just one drop of water in the ocean.”
___________________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, August 24, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: A Foreign University Teacher in Xinjiang
Hello.
Over the years I've always been interested in learning as much as humanly possible about Xinjiang, and a while back a good friend of mine passed along this first person account of a foreigner named Tim who spent some time teaching English at a University in Xinjiang. I always enjoy a first person account, I hope this makes an interesting read.
The original post can be found: HERE
In case that gets blocked I posted the article below:
_______________________________
Too late to talk about Xinjiang?
魏一帆 更新于2009年08月2日
I’ve wanted to write about Xinjiang and the aftermath of events because I lived there for several years. Despite trying several times, I have not written anything for a month. Many people have asked me over the past few weeks what I think really happened. They obviously have their doubts about the official version of events. So do I.
The issue of terrorism is an important one to address. The government maintains that the violence on July 5 was the result of an organized effort. Frankly, this seems dubious to me. Whether it is factual or not, the question of why would Uyghurs would want to do this remains. What conditions would lead to such violence?
I can only speak from my experience living and working there for several years. I only have stories to tell, some of which are based on hearsay. But they will give a sense of the frustrations in Xinjiang.
The day I arrived to teach at Xinjiang University, I noticed that none of the minorities wore traditional hats or veils. A student explained to me that it is not allowed. Nor are mustaches. He said if students are caught praying they face punishment, even expulsion. A fellow teacher confirmed this later.
One day a supervisor who was Han Chinese told me that Uyghurs have it very good because of preferential policies. They can have two children and it is easier to get into college. Later that week a Uyghur friend told me of a protest by Uyghur college graduates. He said none of them could find jobs and that the rate of unemployment is much higher than for Han Chinese.
One day I was teaching a group of seniors in college who were looking for jobs. One young man was frustrated because he said he encountered signs at a job fair that said: “Minorities need not apply.”
One day a Uyghur friend invited me to a traditional muslim banquet. I was the only non-Uyghur among several hundred. Drinking alcohol is not permitted in Islam but there was plenty of baijiu. Near the end of the night, one guest leaned over and said to me unconvincingly, “We are not supposed to do this but the Han make us [get drunk].”
One day I was teaching a class and asked, “What will Xinjiang be like in 50 years?” A Han Chinese girl raised her hand and answered, “All Uyghurs will finally be able to speak Chinese.” The government had just begun implementing a policy of Chinese only in all schools.
I answered: “It is very important for the development of Xinjiang for minorities to speak Chinese. It’s the only way to find good jobs. But what do you think will happen to the culture? Many of my Uyghur friends are worried that they will lose it. According to the research I am familiar with, there are better ways to implement this kind of language policy.” A Uyghur student behind her looked up at me with an expression of gratitude and awe. No one is allowed to point out weaknesses in government policy and get away with it except in a situation like this. I’m sure he had never heard that before.
For the past month I have censored myself because I did not want to criticize or even seem to criticize government actions in Xinjiang. I fear for my friends and my job. I’m also waiting for Southern Weekly to print more articles on the situation with interviews of people who can explain the situation more clearly and authoritatively than I can.
The only salient point I can make at this point is that while terrorism is a real danger, it tends to obscure the core issues. And as long as these issues go unresolved, the threat of violence will continue. Public discussion would help resolve these issues.
Perhaps my words are too late now that Xinjiang is largely out of the news cycle. But for my own peace of mind I need to write this. I have censored myself for the past month, contributing nothing to my column but editorial translations. This is because there is a culture of fear regarding Xinjiang which has caused me to keep quiet. This too is a kind of violence.
__________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Over the years I've always been interested in learning as much as humanly possible about Xinjiang, and a while back a good friend of mine passed along this first person account of a foreigner named Tim who spent some time teaching English at a University in Xinjiang. I always enjoy a first person account, I hope this makes an interesting read.
The original post can be found: HERE
In case that gets blocked I posted the article below:
_______________________________
Too late to talk about Xinjiang?
魏一帆 更新于2009年08月2日
I’ve wanted to write about Xinjiang and the aftermath of events because I lived there for several years. Despite trying several times, I have not written anything for a month. Many people have asked me over the past few weeks what I think really happened. They obviously have their doubts about the official version of events. So do I.
The issue of terrorism is an important one to address. The government maintains that the violence on July 5 was the result of an organized effort. Frankly, this seems dubious to me. Whether it is factual or not, the question of why would Uyghurs would want to do this remains. What conditions would lead to such violence?
I can only speak from my experience living and working there for several years. I only have stories to tell, some of which are based on hearsay. But they will give a sense of the frustrations in Xinjiang.
The day I arrived to teach at Xinjiang University, I noticed that none of the minorities wore traditional hats or veils. A student explained to me that it is not allowed. Nor are mustaches. He said if students are caught praying they face punishment, even expulsion. A fellow teacher confirmed this later.
One day a supervisor who was Han Chinese told me that Uyghurs have it very good because of preferential policies. They can have two children and it is easier to get into college. Later that week a Uyghur friend told me of a protest by Uyghur college graduates. He said none of them could find jobs and that the rate of unemployment is much higher than for Han Chinese.
One day I was teaching a group of seniors in college who were looking for jobs. One young man was frustrated because he said he encountered signs at a job fair that said: “Minorities need not apply.”
One day a Uyghur friend invited me to a traditional muslim banquet. I was the only non-Uyghur among several hundred. Drinking alcohol is not permitted in Islam but there was plenty of baijiu. Near the end of the night, one guest leaned over and said to me unconvincingly, “We are not supposed to do this but the Han make us [get drunk].”
One day I was teaching a class and asked, “What will Xinjiang be like in 50 years?” A Han Chinese girl raised her hand and answered, “All Uyghurs will finally be able to speak Chinese.” The government had just begun implementing a policy of Chinese only in all schools.
I answered: “It is very important for the development of Xinjiang for minorities to speak Chinese. It’s the only way to find good jobs. But what do you think will happen to the culture? Many of my Uyghur friends are worried that they will lose it. According to the research I am familiar with, there are better ways to implement this kind of language policy.” A Uyghur student behind her looked up at me with an expression of gratitude and awe. No one is allowed to point out weaknesses in government policy and get away with it except in a situation like this. I’m sure he had never heard that before.
For the past month I have censored myself because I did not want to criticize or even seem to criticize government actions in Xinjiang. I fear for my friends and my job. I’m also waiting for Southern Weekly to print more articles on the situation with interviews of people who can explain the situation more clearly and authoritatively than I can.
The only salient point I can make at this point is that while terrorism is a real danger, it tends to obscure the core issues. And as long as these issues go unresolved, the threat of violence will continue. Public discussion would help resolve these issues.
Perhaps my words are too late now that Xinjiang is largely out of the news cycle. But for my own peace of mind I need to write this. I have censored myself for the past month, contributing nothing to my column but editorial translations. This is because there is a culture of fear regarding Xinjiang which has caused me to keep quiet. This too is a kind of violence.
__________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Online Market Flourishes
Hello.
I just wanted to write and make my blog followers aware of some new work that was included in the New York Times a few weeks back. It was about how a small community college in Yiwu, Zhejiang, China is running classes that trains kids how to be online entrepreneurs using Taobao, an Ebay-like online marketplace. The story focuses on Yang Fugang who is a graduate of the program and has since created a very successful business with his friends. China is a wild place and it's amazing how young folks throughout the country are embracing the internet and learning new ways to earn a living and create their own business. It's really an honor and a privilege to get to work on stories like this; the country is changing so quickly.
The New York Times story written by David Barboza is below:
__________________________________
Story Link: CLICK HERE
Copy Write New York Times
August 10, 2009
An Online Market Flourishes in China
By DAVID BARBOZA
YIWU, China — In the months leading up to his college graduation in June, Yang Fugang spent most of his days away from campus, managing an online store that sells cosmetics, shampoo and other goods he often buys from local factories.
Today, his store on Taobao.com — China’s fast-growing online shopping bazaar — has 14 employees, two warehouses and piles of cash.
“I never thought I could do this well,” said Mr. Yang, 23, who earned $75,000 last year. “I started out selling yoga mats and now I’m selling a lot of makeup and cosmetics. The profit margins are higher.”
Taobao fever has swept Mr. Yang’s school, Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College, where administrators say a quarter of its 8,800 students now operate a Taobao shop, often from a dorm room.
Across China, millions of others — recent college graduates, shopkeepers and retirees — are also using Taobao to sell clothes, mobile phones, toys and just about anything else they can find at neighborhood stores and wholesale markets or even smuggle out of factories.
Internet analysts say this booming marketplace — reminiscent of the early days of eBay, when Americans started emptying their attics for online auctions — has turned Taobao into China’s newest Internet darling.
Though just six years old, Taobao (Chinese for “to search for treasure”) already has 120 million registered users and 300 million product listings. Its merchants produced nearly $15 billion in sales last year.
The company claims that sales through its Web site are already larger than any Chinese retailer. And, Internet analysts say, sales on its site this year will surpass Amazon.com’s expected sales of about $19 billion.
“This is the next big segment for China’s Internet,” said Jason Brueschke, an Internet analyst at Citigroup in Hong Kong. “It’s their Amazon and eBay combined.”
Like eBay, Taobao does not sell anything itself; it simply matches buyers and sellers. It has a firm foothold in China because many parts of the country still have poor transportation and some local authorities favor their own government-owned outlets, making the retailing system inefficient.
The global recession also left once-booming factories overflowing with goods the rest of the world does not seem to want.
The so-called Taobao addicts are helping to pick up the slack in a sluggish economy. “I can’t live without Taobao,” said Zhang Kangni, a graduate student in Shanghai. “First, it’s cheaper. I found a dress at a store in Shanghai. It’s a Hong Kong brand that sells for $175. I found it on Taobao for $33.”
But skeptics ask: Can Taobao actually make a profit and emerge as a true Web powerhouse?
The company is not publicly traded and therefore does not disclose financial information, but listings are free on Taobao and the company makes no money from online transactions. Almost all Taobao’s $200 million in revenue comes from advertising, which the company says covers virtually all its operational costs.
The company has been criticized, however, for contributing to a flourishing trade in counterfeit goods. Taobao brushes aside such criticism, saying it has a new program that is effectively cracking down on counterfeits.
Company executives also say Taobao is poised to earn huge profits, but that their first priority is creating an online community.
“Our vision for Taobao is to build a consumer’s paradise, where people can shop online and have fun,” Jonathan Lu, Taobao’s president, said. “If you make the company better and better, profits will naturally follow.”
His confidence in Taobao’s future comes from the company’s lineage. It is a division of the Alibaba Group, which was founded by Jack Ma. In the past decade, Mr. Ma has created an Internet conglomerate with strong financial backing from Yahoo, Goldman Sachs and the Softbank Group of Japan. Yahoo owns about 40 percent of Alibaba.
Alibaba.com — the conglomerate’s flagship Web site — connects small businesses from around the world with Chinese exporters. Taobao.com does something similar for consumers who want to sell to other consumers.
When Taobao was founded in 2003, it appeared to have no chance. EBay and its Chinese partner, EachNet, controlled 90 percent of China’s online shopping. But Mr. Ma, a former English teacher, quickly undermined eBay’s fee-based service by offering free listings on Taobao, essentially giving away ads to anyone who wanted to sell.
At the time, eBay executives ridiculed the strategy, with many repeating that “free is not a business model.”
But almost immediately, the site took off, and in 2006, eBay pulled out of China, citing dwindling market share and large losses. Today, it is Taobao that commands 80 percent of China’s e-commerce market, according to iResearch.
“Taobao is dominant,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. “They’re like an online Wal-Mart.” Mr. Ji says Taobao is a threat not only to traditional retailers but also to big Chinese Internet companies, like Baidu, a leading search engine, because they are competing with Taobao for many of the same advertisers.
Taobao has thrived, Internet analysts say, because people do not need much capital to start online stores. This year, Taobao says its site could help create half a million new jobs, mostly among young people opening new online stores.
Bao Yifen, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, opened her clothing shop with a $5,000 investment in 2007. Today, her Taobao store has sales of about $4,000 a month.
“Three times a week I go to the wholesale market,” Ms. Bao said. “It’s a huge market. About 70 to 80 percent of the stuff is factory leftovers. There are even some brands, but they just cut the labels off.”
Items smuggled into China from Hong Kong, Europe or the United States are also sold on Taobao, evading high import duties and enabling sellers to profit by undercutting the prices of merchandise in regular stores. An Apple MacBook Air that sells for $2,225 in Beijing, for instance, costs just $1,508 in Hong Kong, a difference of 33 percent.
Counterfeit goods are also readily available, even though Taobao claims to have removed two million “fake branded goods” from the site.
Nevertheless, many Taobao sellers acknowledge dealing in illegal goods.
“I work in an O.E.M. factory that produces laptops and electronic devices for Sony,” said one such seller, who identified himself Mr. Feng, referring to an original equipment manufacturer that produces goods for global companies. “We have Sony’s core technology and exactly the same raw materials and components, so we set up our own store selling netbooks and laptops on Taobao.”
A spokesman for Sony, Takashi Uehara, said the company had no comment but was looking into the matter.
Here in Yiwu, which claims to be the site of the world’s biggest wholesale market, Taobao has started to change the look of Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College.
The school’s vice dean, Jia Shaohua, points out an area designated as a start-up site for students seeking to get rich. He points to students taking orders by computer, packaging products, sorting inventory and taking photos of the items for display online, then adds, “Around the school now, there is a whole Taobao industrial chain.”
Every afternoon, even this summer, when the school should be relatively empty, one can hear the ripping sounds of tape being wrapped around boxes in a building that could pass for a United Parcel Service shipping terminal.
“The students don’t need a lot of money,” Mr. Jia said. “They just get orders and go find the items at local factories.”
Mr. Yang, the cosmetics seller, has become a campus hero. He operates his own warehouses a few miles from the school, in the basements of a pair of residential buildings.
Standing in his crowded warehouse, near boxes of Neutrogena sun block, hairpins, toothbrushes and a wide assortment of cosmetics, Mr. Yang says business could not be better.
“Soon, I’ll reach $150,000 a month in sales,” he said, flashing a big grin.
__________________________________
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, August 17, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Ami Vitale : Video Photography w/ Nikon D300S
Hello.
Over the years I've had a lot of friends, and even some clients, ask me when I was going to make the switch to video. I usually replied with a stubborn "NEVER"!
But this Recent Video shot by Ami Vitale, an accomplished stills photographer, using the new Nikon DSLR D300S has left me wondering if there can really be a future for someone like me in the video world.
Let me first say that the video is stunning. Ami is a wonderful image maker and her composition and work with the video function are lovely. The Nikon D300S seems to be very capable of producing some very high quality video, whether it is better than the 5D MII is up to someone else to judge. I've had my MII's for more than half a year now and I've never even attempted to use the video function, which leads me to wonder...
Obviously Ami is sponsored by Nikon and they put up some big money to produce this 5m22s video. Not only did Ami most likely spend a few weeks shooting in India, some of the video was staged and the content that Ami produced was masterfully edited. Without being an expert in video, I can't even begin to imagine how many hours all that content took to review, edit and sync to music; can any videographers leave comments with just a hint or how long that might take, assuming you are already a master with software like Final Cut?
The point is that it is true, highly motivated, highly skilled photographers can make great video when they have the resources behind them and people to assist; especially for the very timely editing process. But is video really the future of our industry? Are magazines printed on paper really doomed?
While I don't really know the answers to any of the questions I've posed in this blog, all I can say is that I'm happily moving in the opposite direction. I'm shooting more film than ever before and producing more Black and White fine art and I have 3 gallery shows lined up for next year already. I think there is still a lot of power and emotion in the still image; and while the masters who came before us documented much, I still think there is a place for me to carve out a unique niche for myself.
And while I stand strongly behind my personal opinion, please don't assume that I take anything away from the wonderful video that Ami shot. She produced a video that was visually stunning; a cracking effort and a clear example of what is possible with resources at hand.
LINK to Ami's Video
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Over the years I've had a lot of friends, and even some clients, ask me when I was going to make the switch to video. I usually replied with a stubborn "NEVER"!
But this Recent Video shot by Ami Vitale, an accomplished stills photographer, using the new Nikon DSLR D300S has left me wondering if there can really be a future for someone like me in the video world.
Let me first say that the video is stunning. Ami is a wonderful image maker and her composition and work with the video function are lovely. The Nikon D300S seems to be very capable of producing some very high quality video, whether it is better than the 5D MII is up to someone else to judge. I've had my MII's for more than half a year now and I've never even attempted to use the video function, which leads me to wonder...
Obviously Ami is sponsored by Nikon and they put up some big money to produce this 5m22s video. Not only did Ami most likely spend a few weeks shooting in India, some of the video was staged and the content that Ami produced was masterfully edited. Without being an expert in video, I can't even begin to imagine how many hours all that content took to review, edit and sync to music; can any videographers leave comments with just a hint or how long that might take, assuming you are already a master with software like Final Cut?
The point is that it is true, highly motivated, highly skilled photographers can make great video when they have the resources behind them and people to assist; especially for the very timely editing process. But is video really the future of our industry? Are magazines printed on paper really doomed?
While I don't really know the answers to any of the questions I've posed in this blog, all I can say is that I'm happily moving in the opposite direction. I'm shooting more film than ever before and producing more Black and White fine art and I have 3 gallery shows lined up for next year already. I think there is still a lot of power and emotion in the still image; and while the masters who came before us documented much, I still think there is a place for me to carve out a unique niche for myself.
And while I stand strongly behind my personal opinion, please don't assume that I take anything away from the wonderful video that Ami shot. She produced a video that was visually stunning; a cracking effort and a clear example of what is possible with resources at hand.
LINK to Ami's Video
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, August 14, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: The Presidents Son
Hello.
Some blogs make me giggle, others can bring tears to my eyes. This one falls somewhere in the middle. I just wanted to write a bit about how similar China's version of paternal capitalism is with that of the United States. In a BBC article earlier this week it was reported that Hu Jintao's son runs a company that makes airport security scanners. His company is knee-deep in Africa; and Namibia recently launched a bribery case against his firm.
When reading this I instantly thought of George Bush Senior and his son. George Bush Junior got in all kinds of trouble as a private business man in Texas before his father had lost his patience bailing him out of trouble and decided to help engineer his political career; and the rest is history.
But Hu Jintao's case is a little bit different. It is common knowledge in China that all the big political bosses in the Communist Party have children who are surprisingly capable business men and women; go figure. It seems that most of the top leaders have sons who run massive investment companies, property companies or in some cases even state-run energy companies. But the message that this sends to people in China does much more damage than the small bribery cases in Africa.
You see, China is desperately trying to clean itself up. Corruption is blatant and everywhere, and while top leaders in Beijing have cleaned themselves up considerably, they've just simply passed the buck (literally) on to their very powerful children; who oddly enough don't have any interest in politics as long as business is good. The message this sends to small county governors in the Chinese countryside is that if the big guys up top can get their cake and eat it to, then I'm going to do the same. And of course "the people" suffer.
Capitalism, or state run capitalism, is a killer without independent checks and balances, and China likes the balances tipped just the way they are. So is China's push to stamp out corruption real? Sure, but it is selective at best and corrupt at worse.
Last year during the Olympics I was losing my mind waiting in line ups at airports around China as bags were x-rayed after they were collected from the baggage claim, as an extra security measure. At least now I know why there were twice as many xray machines in the airports then most would need. You gotta spread the wealth. The BBC story is below.
__________________________________
Copywrite BBC
China firm in Namibia bribe claim
Nuctech is a leading supplier of airport security scanners. Namibia is investigating allegations of bribery over a government contract with a Chinese state-owned firm that has links to President Hu Jintao's son.
Namibia's anti-corruption commission said it would like to question Hu Haifeng, but that he was not a suspect. Hu Haifeng was president of the firm, Nuctech, until last year.
Nuctech is suspected of bribing a Namibian consultancy in connection with a $56m (£34m) deal to supply scanners to Namibia's ports and airports. The co-owners of consultancy Teko Trading, Teckla Lameck and Kongo Mokaxwa, and Nuctech's Africa representative Yang Fan, were arrested last week and are still in custody. Teko Trading is alleged to have received $13.2m from Nuctech.
The Chinese firm is a global leader in X-ray scanners and security devices. Hu Haifeng, 38, was president of the firm until last year when he was promoted to a post with Tsinghua Holdings, the group that controls Nuctech and a number of other companies.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Some blogs make me giggle, others can bring tears to my eyes. This one falls somewhere in the middle. I just wanted to write a bit about how similar China's version of paternal capitalism is with that of the United States. In a BBC article earlier this week it was reported that Hu Jintao's son runs a company that makes airport security scanners. His company is knee-deep in Africa; and Namibia recently launched a bribery case against his firm.
When reading this I instantly thought of George Bush Senior and his son. George Bush Junior got in all kinds of trouble as a private business man in Texas before his father had lost his patience bailing him out of trouble and decided to help engineer his political career; and the rest is history.
But Hu Jintao's case is a little bit different. It is common knowledge in China that all the big political bosses in the Communist Party have children who are surprisingly capable business men and women; go figure. It seems that most of the top leaders have sons who run massive investment companies, property companies or in some cases even state-run energy companies. But the message that this sends to people in China does much more damage than the small bribery cases in Africa.
You see, China is desperately trying to clean itself up. Corruption is blatant and everywhere, and while top leaders in Beijing have cleaned themselves up considerably, they've just simply passed the buck (literally) on to their very powerful children; who oddly enough don't have any interest in politics as long as business is good. The message this sends to small county governors in the Chinese countryside is that if the big guys up top can get their cake and eat it to, then I'm going to do the same. And of course "the people" suffer.
Capitalism, or state run capitalism, is a killer without independent checks and balances, and China likes the balances tipped just the way they are. So is China's push to stamp out corruption real? Sure, but it is selective at best and corrupt at worse.
Last year during the Olympics I was losing my mind waiting in line ups at airports around China as bags were x-rayed after they were collected from the baggage claim, as an extra security measure. At least now I know why there were twice as many xray machines in the airports then most would need. You gotta spread the wealth. The BBC story is below.
__________________________________
Copywrite BBC
China firm in Namibia bribe claim
Nuctech is a leading supplier of airport security scanners. Namibia is investigating allegations of bribery over a government contract with a Chinese state-owned firm that has links to President Hu Jintao's son.
Namibia's anti-corruption commission said it would like to question Hu Haifeng, but that he was not a suspect. Hu Haifeng was president of the firm, Nuctech, until last year.
Nuctech is suspected of bribing a Namibian consultancy in connection with a $56m (£34m) deal to supply scanners to Namibia's ports and airports. The co-owners of consultancy Teko Trading, Teckla Lameck and Kongo Mokaxwa, and Nuctech's Africa representative Yang Fan, were arrested last week and are still in custody. Teko Trading is alleged to have received $13.2m from Nuctech.
The Chinese firm is a global leader in X-ray scanners and security devices. Hu Haifeng, 38, was president of the firm until last year when he was promoted to a post with Tsinghua Holdings, the group that controls Nuctech and a number of other companies.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, August 10, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: MeiliXue Mountain Trek on Resolve
Hello.
A few months back I completed a grueling trek around a holy mountain in Southeastern Tibet. The work is unpublished which is why I've only left a teaser image from the series. No slide show at the moment. But a few week back this blog was published on the Livebooks Resolve Blog. I am now a regular contributor to the Livebooks Resolve Blog and I'll try to make everyone aware of new postings. Read the blog below.
________________________
A Short Walk in to Tibet
By: Ryan Pyle
For years I’ve been hiking in China, and just about anytime I can squeeze out a few free days I jump on a plane to Sichuan or Yunnan province, in Southwest China, for a bit of nature. I always shoot during my trips and have grown adept at both executing these treks and managing to come back with images that have the potential to become a published story. In other words I’m well versed in extreme altitude, extreme weather, and cameras.
So it was with utter delight that I took an assignment in June to document the religious mountain of Meilixue in Southeastern Tibet. The “holy mountain” is scared to Tibetan Buddhists and is home to a kora or “holy trek” that is ranked China’s most difficult trek by the China Mountaineering Association. Pilgrims make the trek around the holy mountain, a complete circumnavigation, and the process is said to cleanse the soul. Sitting in my apartment in Shanghai, it was difficult to contemplate a ten-day, 300-kilometer trek through Tibet. A series of questions began running through my mind: How was I supposed to walk 12 hours a day and still make strong images? Was there a road? Was there mobile phone access? Was there electricity?
My first decision was to shoot film -- digital just wasn't going to cut it for this trip. Not only would electricity be scarce, but extreme temperature fluctuations would further drain the batteries and potentially just be too tough for my Canon 5D MII’s. So I dusted off my Canon 1Ns and bought 200 rolls of Fuji Provia. Luckily I already had all the gear, clothes, and footwear needed to attempt such a journey, so I didn’t have to scramble at the last minute. Excitement was beginning to sink in.
A few days later, fear began to sink in, too. When I began my research in earnest, I was disturbed by how little information existed about this trek, including crucial details: the length of the trek, it’s difficulty, and possible villages along the route. I was able to dig up two resources: a China Trekking site compiled by a person who had obviously never trekked in his/her entire life and a travel website built by two German hikers who had done the trek about 3-4 years earlier.
The Germans had charted the kora (pilgrimage) as being somewhere in the region of 300 km (185 miles), meaning that I needed to cover roughly 15 to 20 miles a day to complete the trek in a reasonable amount of time. That meant I probably needed to sleep in a tent every night, cook my own food, walk for eight-to-ten hours a day -- at altitude -- while stopping as often as possible to document and record the journey. This was starting to sound like mission impossible. Did I mention that each day was a vertical assent or descent? And that there are three passes over 4,500 meters (15,000 feet)?
With gear sorted, and research done, I still needed to find a local guide. You never go wondering into Tibet without a Tibetan. And you never go climbing around on a mountain without someone who has been on that mountain since they were ten years old. In this part of the world, people die on the mountains -- the only safety you can count on is experience. Finding a guide proved to be difficult, and in the end I decided that I would find the right person in the village where I would start my journey. That was a potentially risky move, but like everywhere in the world, you can usually make things happen once you are on the ground. Half the time –- no matter how well organized you are –- everything changes once you are on location anyways.
My flight to Zhongdian, now named Shangri-la, was easy enough. Zhongdian is the first town on the Tibetan plateau in China’s Southwestern Yunnan province. I decided to fly in and rest there for two days; at 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) it would be an ideal place to acclimatize before making more aggressive moves into the mountains. Taking the time to acclimatize in this part of the world is as essential as remembering to bring film for your camera. Without spending the first day or two resting, you are setting yourself up for attitude sickness and possibly worse.
From there, getting to the mountains was easy enough and as the initial adrenaline rush gave way to reality, the trek revealed itself to be the most visually beautiful, emotionally rewarding, and physically and mentally challenging experience of my life. And all that was crammed into just nine days.
Without giving away too of a story that is not yet published, I can say that the Germans were wrong in their calculations -- the trek is around 400km (250 miles), when taking into account the switch backs and detours. That made for about thirty miles a day. My writing partner and I completed the journey in nine days and suffered some of the most extreme weather conditions I’ve witnessed in my decade of traveling in the region. We were rained on, snowed on, hailed on. On the last day, it was 25C (77F) when we woke up and -20C (-4F) just seven hours later, at 4,900 meters, with wind strong enough to knock you off your feet. I lost about twenty pounds in the process and gained a completely new respect for our Tibetan guides who floated effortlessly over high passes and across windy plateaus.
As far as the gear was concerned, the Northface tent, sleeping bags and jackets performed wonderfully, especially with violent temperature fluctuations. The Canon 1Ns held up beautifully in rain, snow, and sleet. The Fuji Provia was, as always, the right color film for the job. And after walking up and down mountains for ten hours a day in the remote Himalaya’s, I feel as though I could face down Michael Phelps, on dry land at least.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Final Reminder, Gallery Exhibition "Chinese Turkistan"
Hello,
Bare with me, just a final reminder that my Chinese Turkistan show will run tomorrow. The show will be held at the newly renovated Dylan Ellis Gallery (DEG)
Dylan Ellis Gallery
42 Industrial Street,
Toronto, ON M4G 1Y9
Hours: M-f 9am to 5pm;
Sat. noon - 5pm, Sun. by Appointment
416.406.3131
The opening time on Thursday night is 630pm, that's when I'll hold a Q&A and that will be followed by a reception from 7pm to 9pm. I'll also be at the gallery after the show on Friday August 7th and Saturday August 8th in case anyone would like to stop by and discuss the project. I'll also make myself available prior to the show should anyone be interested in learning more about the region of Chinese Turkistan and my inspiration behind the project. With the recent news of unrest in Urumqi I feel that it is really time to begin looking more closely at Xinjiang, and begin a serious dialog about the repercussions of such unrest. It's often considered a forgotten part of the world, but the people there are beginning to rise up and are very capable of challenging government authority.
In my eyes the project is timely and beginning to come together. I hope you'll have a chance to attend the show. The work will stay on display at the DEG for 2 months after August 6th. I hope there is a chance to meet up with each and every one of you at some stage. Follow the gallery website link above to view my bio and project summary as well as some of the images that will be displayed at the show.
I hope if you are in Toronto you'll have a chance to stop by.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, July 31, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Gallery Exhibition "Chinese Turkistan"
Hello,
I just wanted to let you know that preparations for my solo gallery show, which will open on Thursday August 6th, are nearly finished.
The show will be held at the newly renovated Dylan Ellis Gallery (DEG): (http://www.elevatordigital.ca/deg/)
Dylan Ellis Gallery
42 Industrial Street,
Toronto, ON M4G 1Y9
Hours: M-f 9am to 5pm;
Sat. noon - 5pm, Sun. by Appointment
416.406.3131
The opening time on Thursday night is 630pm, that's when I'll hold a Q&A and that will be followed by a reception from 7pm to 9pm. I'll also be at the gallery after the show on Friday August 7th and Saturday August 8th in case anyone would like to stop by and discuss the project. I'll also make myself available prior to the show should anyone be interested in learning more about the region of Chinese Turkistan and my inspiration behind the project. With the recent news of unrest in Urumqi I feel that it is really time to begin looking more closely at Xinjiang, and begin a serious dialog about the repercussions of such unrest. It's often considered a forgotten part of the world, but the people there are beginning to rise up and are very capable of challenging government authority.
In my eyes the project is timely and beginning to come together. I hope you'll have a chance to attend the show. The work will stay on display at the DEG for 2 months after August 6th. I hope there is a chance to meet up with each and every one of you at some stage. Follow the gallery website link above to view my bio and project summary as well as some of the images that will be displayed at the show.
I hope if you are in Toronto you'll have a chance to stop by.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Friday, July 24, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Accessing my Blog
Hello.
I've been in North America working for the last few weeks and I can't tell you what a dream it is not having to worry about internet filters and restrictions. Living in China, I often have to use a proxy to evade the firewall. This needs to be used on a daily basis to update my website and blog, and it can be an exhausting process as the proxies are never very stable.
Being in Toronto, and North America in general, I can't believe how bliss it is just being able to access my blog and various websites. It's quick and easy, and the funny thing is that Canadians, and American's, don't look corrupted by internet content. So is the benevolent filtering really helpful? Or is China just making the problem much bigger than it is so that they can save a few thousand "net nanny" jobs at the Propaganda Bureau?
Making jobs is important in this day and age, but the "net nanny" society that currently exists in China wreaks of the Cultural Revolution era when children ratted out their parents and neighbors for "capitalist behavior". I wish we could all just grow up a bit. Yes, there are lots of bad things on the internet; and there are lots of good things as well. Make it free, get parents to do there job and get the government to back off.
Some days it can be exhausting living in the day to day mess that is China. Luckily, I have my proxy. I just need to find a way to upload pictures to clients faster and I'll be well on my way to a fully functioning photographer; instead of one trapped behind a fire wall that makes updating his Facebook "status" a 30 minute painful ordeal.
I promise, that's the last bitch session about the internet in China.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
I've been in North America working for the last few weeks and I can't tell you what a dream it is not having to worry about internet filters and restrictions. Living in China, I often have to use a proxy to evade the firewall. This needs to be used on a daily basis to update my website and blog, and it can be an exhausting process as the proxies are never very stable.
Being in Toronto, and North America in general, I can't believe how bliss it is just being able to access my blog and various websites. It's quick and easy, and the funny thing is that Canadians, and American's, don't look corrupted by internet content. So is the benevolent filtering really helpful? Or is China just making the problem much bigger than it is so that they can save a few thousand "net nanny" jobs at the Propaganda Bureau?
Making jobs is important in this day and age, but the "net nanny" society that currently exists in China wreaks of the Cultural Revolution era when children ratted out their parents and neighbors for "capitalist behavior". I wish we could all just grow up a bit. Yes, there are lots of bad things on the internet; and there are lots of good things as well. Make it free, get parents to do there job and get the government to back off.
Some days it can be exhausting living in the day to day mess that is China. Luckily, I have my proxy. I just need to find a way to upload pictures to clients faster and I'll be well on my way to a fully functioning photographer; instead of one trapped behind a fire wall that makes updating his Facebook "status" a 30 minute painful ordeal.
I promise, that's the last bitch session about the internet in China.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: The NEW Ryan Pyle Website
Hello.
It has only been a few months since my last website upgrade, I know a bit skittish. While my previous website was more than adequate it was tough to edit, upgrade and make changes to. So I've opted for the new Photojournalism website service set up by Livebooks.com. It's about US$45 per month, less if you pay for a full year. Very flexible and easily upgraded-able. I can change my contact details and photo essays using their clean back-end user interface.
While it's all flash, it runs very quickly, they also have a full meta-data program that should keep me well listed on search engines.
It's clean, easy to make changes to and more than does the job. Hopefully potential clients will find it enticing enough to give me a bell. Needless to say, I'm pleased with the site, the service and the speed with which the tech folks get back to me.
Am I endorsing it? Well, no. I spent a lot of time and energy telling people how much I loved Digital Railroad and that really came back to haunt me. But Livebooks provides a good service for ME. And I'm pleased. You'll need to make your own choices. Best of luck.
My new website can be viewed at: www.ryanpyle.com
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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It has only been a few months since my last website upgrade, I know a bit skittish. While my previous website was more than adequate it was tough to edit, upgrade and make changes to. So I've opted for the new Photojournalism website service set up by Livebooks.com. It's about US$45 per month, less if you pay for a full year. Very flexible and easily upgraded-able. I can change my contact details and photo essays using their clean back-end user interface.
While it's all flash, it runs very quickly, they also have a full meta-data program that should keep me well listed on search engines.
It's clean, easy to make changes to and more than does the job. Hopefully potential clients will find it enticing enough to give me a bell. Needless to say, I'm pleased with the site, the service and the speed with which the tech folks get back to me.
Am I endorsing it? Well, no. I spent a lot of time and energy telling people how much I loved Digital Railroad and that really came back to haunt me. But Livebooks provides a good service for ME. And I'm pleased. You'll need to make your own choices. Best of luck.
My new website can be viewed at: www.ryanpyle.com
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Monday, July 20, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: The Umbrella Men!
Hello.
Being a journalist in China is tough. How tough? Will, of all the journalists in China I think that television journalists have it the worst. They can't really conceal the big cameras and often try to do their piece with the news actually happening behind them, a tall order.
A good friend of mine recently forwarded me a clip of "plain clothes" police officers running some interference during both a BBC and CNN story in Beijing. Is being a journalist in China dangerous? Not usually. Is being a journalist in China mind numbing and frustrating beyond belief? In most instances, yes. Please enjoy the video, click the link below:
The Umbrella Men
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Being a journalist in China is tough. How tough? Will, of all the journalists in China I think that television journalists have it the worst. They can't really conceal the big cameras and often try to do their piece with the news actually happening behind them, a tall order.
A good friend of mine recently forwarded me a clip of "plain clothes" police officers running some interference during both a BBC and CNN story in Beijing. Is being a journalist in China dangerous? Not usually. Is being a journalist in China mind numbing and frustrating beyond belief? In most instances, yes. Please enjoy the video, click the link below:
The Umbrella Men
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
_______________________________________
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Kodak Suffering / But Still Supporting
Hello.
I have been wanting to blog about Kodak for some time now, and it took an article I read a few weeks back to jump-start my process.
First the article: yes, according to the photo world Kodak is retiring Kodachrome, it's most famous color film brand; used for decades by thousands of photographers; and was even the film used by Steve McCurry when he captured his famous "Afghan girl with green eyes" image that graced the cover of best selling National Geographic edition ever.
LINK: New York Times: Kodak Will Retire Kodachrome
I was shocked to read that color film only seems to represent 1% of Kodaks "still-picture" business, while they generate 70% of their revenues from digital sources. Amazing that Kodak, once synonymous with the word "film" is now out of the color game that it started in the 1950s and 1960s. It's a bit of a sad day for us film lovers out there.
Moving laterally, but still slightly on topic, I am a heavy user of Black and White Kodak TriX 400 film. It's what I use to produce my work from Xinjiang and I completely depend on it for the completion of my project. And even while Kodak is clearly experiencing a lot of turmoil in their film business, I actually received a very nice letter from Mary jane Hellyar, who was also interviewed in the NYTimes article, who congratulated me on being named an emerging photographer by PDN and then proceeded to offer me a significant amount of Black and White TriX for free; to help support my work.
I was stunned................in a good way. I would just like to use this space to again thank Mary Jane Hellyar and Kodak. Big batches of film are the best gift in the world.
Mary Jane Hellyar is the President of Kodak's film business and the offer of assistance and support is very welcomed. I was overwhelmed with her letter and very appreciative to have a company whose products I use to produce my images offer some form of support. Given the state of the film industry I would have to say that my enthusiasm is even greater.
In a show of continued support I just ordered about 200 rolls of TriX on B&H a few days back. This autumn is going to be full of some heavy shooting as I am trying to put the finishing touches on my Xinjiang project. I hope the film division of Kodak are around long enough to see the published work. My guess is they will be. Black and White and fine art photographers still rely pretty heavily on Kodak and my guess is that their Black and White business is still profitable; and I hope that is not just wishful thinking.
Again, thank you Kodak! :)
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Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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Friday, July 10, 2009
Ryan Pyle Blog: Work Conditions Getting Worse
Hello.
Much fuss was made last year when China unveiled a series of labor laws that seemed to better protect the average worker. Now an URBAN debate continues to rage on whether the labors laws just protect the unproductive or whether they are really useful, and timely.
But what about the migrant workers? Are they protected under the labor law and have their lives improved? Well, the labor law, see article, seemed to be focused in the right places but no one was expecting a financial crisis - which led to a demand crisis - which led to a Chinese export crisis - which led to a Dongguan crisis - which led to most employers throwing the new labor law out the window. What a series of chain reactions!
LINK: New York Times: Despite Law, Job Conditions Worsen in China
David Barboza for the New York Times writes an interesting feature on the plight of one family, in one factory and how that relates to the industry at large. I photographed the portrait of the family in question under very tense conditions just a few steps away from the factory where their son had been killed.
Having spent so much time in China, I've seen my fair share of factory floors and I had been under the impression that things were improving. Over the years working conditions have improved, even if wages and living conditions haven't. But workers still work too many hours, too much overtime and in poorly lit conditions - which leds to exhaustion and avoidable accidents, sometimes fatal.
My intention for this blog is to raise awareness that the financial crisis is causing cut backs not just in the US and Europe but also on the factory floors of southern China; and those cutbacks have led to more dangerous working conditions the for the most exposed portion of China's population - it's migrant workers. Please do read the article, it's a good one; I am very glad I was able to be a part of it.
--
Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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