A few days after arriving in China early in 2004, neophyte English teacher Tom Carter snapped a photo —a wonderful, exuberant photo that expresses much of what many westerners imagine 21st-century China to be.
The picture is of Carter’s class, pupils of the Number 2 Primary School of Shengli Oilfield, in Dongying, Shandong province. In western-style dress, but wearing the knotted red scarves of the Chinese public school student, the children clamour for the attention of the photographer, their eyes bright with enthusiasm, their cheeks flushed with excitement.
Were it not for the unseemly disorder of the children’s display, the photo might be mistaken for piece of official propaganda.

Odyssey

There are echos of kitschy Cultural Revolution posters here. But this is a revolution of an altogether different sort — the new China, growing in prosperity, bursting with self-confidence, revelling in unfamiliar acts of self-expression.
The photo was intended only as a personal momento, a partial record of the the San Francisco native’s teaching adventure in Asia. Instead, it became the starting point of an odyssey.
You’ll find it on page 130 of Tom Carter’s recently released book, CHINA; Portrait of a People. That puts it barely a fifth of the way through the exhaustive photographic journal.
After a year teaching in the new industrial city of Dongying, and another in the capital Beijing, Carter knew just enough of China to realise he knew very little. Nomadic by nature – the 35-year-old had previously spent a year and a half backpacking though Mexico and Central America – he decided to hit the road in search of the real China, in all its various postures.
Sometime during his two year trek through China’s 33 provinces – by train, bus, boat and on foot – he realised he had the makings of a book. Not a vast, ostentatious coffee-table book whose square footage is more impressive than its photographic count, but a square, dense tome, bursting with nearly 900 images.
Carter’s photographs – of disco girls and beggars, businessmen and farmers, gangsters and monks, and of the far-different facets of China they inhabit – are divided by province, each section marked by a foldout map that acts as a pre-determined bookmark for browsers.
Each province gets a half a dozen paragraphs of exposition, but the photographs largely speak for themselves
If Carter had his way, the book would be almost half as long again.

Image conscious

There is apparently more to the collective portrait of China than even this whopping collection can encompass. He is pleased, however, that certain images did not get excised despite the initials concerns of his Hong Kong publisher: pictures of civil unrest in Hunan province, and his “hit-and run” photos of coal miners in Shanxi, soon after a fatal mine explosion.
The book devotes 16-pages to Macau, and includes as many photos of grinning school kids, censorious grannies, and cocky construction workers as neon-bright casinos and Portuguese architecture.
“I stayed at the charmingly dilapidated San Va Hospedaria for a couple weeks, and that old inn perfectly embodies the spirit of my journey,” Carter said in a recent interview. “My working knowledge of Macau is very bipolar. I tried mixing with all the beautiful people at the grand opening of the Venetian, but truth be told, I had more interesting conversations at 3am with the working girls on Rua de Felicidade.”
The image of Macau one is left with is fragmented and inconclusive, but intriguing. The same could be said of the sketch of the entire country delivered by CHINA: Portrait of a People . This is not meant as criticism; China IS fragmented and inconclusive which is a large part of why it is intriguing, not only to Tom Carter, but likely to anyone who pores over his handsome book.

by Tony Atherton