China Obscura.
San Francisco. Chronicle Books. (Circa 2004). Stock ID #180829 "Travelling by chance to mainland China just a day after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, young Chinese-American photographer Mark Leong decided to stay and explore in photos the fascinating contradictions of a rapidly-changing, but still very traditional, Chinese society. When referring to this item please quote stockid 180829.
Profuse black and white photographic images, unpaginated, a prior owner's chop title page, very good oblong hardback in pictorial paper boards. 15.9 x 23.4cm.
Living in Beijing and travelling across China for the past fifteen years, he has captured images that astonish both with their power and with the access that he has found to both official and underground Chinese society: a young graffiti artist named "AK-47" plies his trade, a government official tends to an abandoned park, teenage rollerbladers hope for Western corporate sponsorship, a nervous stockbroker with his black-market handgun, migrant workers sleeping in train stations, police officers barricading the U.S. Embassy against street demonstrators, a drug addict snorting heroin off a bill bearing the image of Chairman Mao.
In more than 150 photographs (with illuminating captions at the back), along with an introduction by the photographer and essays by Chinese dissident poet Yang Lien, and author Peter Hessler (whose book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtzee won the prestigious Kiriyama Prize and was excerpted in the New Yorker)." (Publisher's description).
Price: $35.00 AU