In 1985 I had the good fortune to travel to China accompanying a group of school children from Coventry in the UK taking a theatrical show to Jinan which is twinned with the city. A seventeen day trip with a few days in Beijing and then onto Jinan on the steam powered express train, top speed 40mph.
I was at the very start of my photographic career. I’d been paid to shoot one job at this point, a McDonalds in Chester! With the exuberance of youth I wasn’t remotely phased about going to China! I was also videographer for the trip having never videoed anything at that point. That was a shoulder mount camera with umbilical to a pack the size of a reel to reel tape recorder. So that and three Olympus SLR’s, OM1, OM2 and an OM20.
I took about 10 rolls of Tri-X and ten rolls of Ektachrome. Needless to say I ran out very quickly and immediately bought Chinese monochrome film which was for sale at every tourist spot.
We were being guided everywhere by the wonderful Frank and Doris. When I asked them why they had western names they said it was protocol and were given them to use as guides. Their job was to keep us all in line and make sure we saw the parts that we were supposed to see. Needless to say when everybody turned right off the bus I would turn left and go wandering. A lot of the images came form sneaking off once I had photographed dignitaries shaking hands and the kids eating cold chips! The kids had an amazing time but were a little traumatised by the wonderful simple food and lived on sweets for half the time.
My technique was to take an incident reading, set all three cameras and on the wide angle use a hyperfocal distance to be able to shoot very quickly. Not always successful for sure.
I came back with a few thousand images mostly taken on that truly terrible Chinese monochrome film stock. For various reasons this is the first time any of them, apart from a very few, have seen the light of day.
Unfortunately my note taking/metadata was non existent so I cannot recall at all where they were taken. Some are obvious like Tiananmen Square, The Summer Palace and The Great Wall but the exact location of the intimate portraits and the street scenes is a mystery.
Scanning and retouching these images has been a very poignant labour of love. I wonder what happened to all these people in the intervening years.
The poor quality and damaged film has taken days to restore in some cases. It's a strange thing to be using modern software and techniques on images like this taken when Photoshop was still another five years away from launch.
These images and the memories embedded in them mean the world to me. I think my favourite is the one shown here. These two boys. I really wonder how their life progressed. The lifespan in China in 1985 was 66 so it’s entirely possible they are still with us. I truly hope they are.
As part of the trip involved photographing a theatre show this sort of marks the very start of my career as a performance photographer!
There is a selection on my website if anybody wishes to see more. I will certainly add more as I work my way through them.
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