travling photography

During my regular photo walks in New York City's Chinatown, I chanced upon another poster advertising a forthcoming Chinese (Cantonese) Opera at the Chinese Community Center's theater on Mott Street. Naturally, I booked my seat, and attended its featured show titled The Legend of the Purple Hairpin. All the front and center seats were booked (at $100 each, I suppose that the show's sponsoring businesses and VIPs got them for free and/or at a discounted price), but I secured a front row aisle seat at the side...not ideal, but it gave me the freedom to move should I need to. I chose to use my Fuji X-Pro2 and the Fujinon XF 18-135 F3.5-5.6 OIS WR (the equivalent of a 28-200mm) to give me the reach I would need. The  Fujinon  XF 18-135 F3.5-5.6 OIS WR is my least favorite (and least used) Fuji lens because of its aperture limitation. However, I found that its OIS ( Optical Image Stabilizer) compensates for this limitation quite well, and from my previous experience at the sam...

Photo � Li Jianzeng | All Rights Reserved I'm currently immersed (well, partially) in research for what I hope may be a long term project, involving various types of Chinese Opera. It's a lot to chew on since Chinese Opera has innumerable varieties. For instance, there's the well known Beijing Opera, known also as Peking Opera (Jing Ju), and which is regarded as the standard opera of China. There's also the Cantonese Opera, (known as Yue Ju) and that's performed in Cantonese; the Sichuan Opera which is also widely known in mainland China and is delivered in Mandarin; the Ping Opera (Ping Ju) which is easy for the audience to understand, and thus popular with rural communities and especially where people are not well educated. There's also the Henan Opera (Yu Ju), the Qinqiang Opera, the Kunqu Opera and the Huangmei Opera. For this post, I am featuring a gallery by Chinese photographer Li Jianzeng* of th e Daoqing opera popular among villagers in some of the p...

Photo � Karolin Kl�ppel | All Rights Reserved The definition of ethno-photography is that it consists of images of different people and aspects of their lifestyle in order to document their culture. This photography genre is widely used by ethnographers to aid them in their observation and study of the traditions, customs, daily life, ceremonies, and people of a particular culture. And Karolin Kl�ppel's ' The Dabu '  is a classic example of ethnophotography. The Mosuo, also known as the Dabu, are a Chinese ethnic minority of around 40,000 people that enjoyed hundreds of years of relative stability in a complex matriarchal structure that values female power and decision-making.  Centered around Lugu Lake; high up in the Himalayas between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, the area is somewhat insular and is naturally protected from outside influences.   The area is known for  the Mosuo, the �Kingdom of Women�. The most striking tradition  among the Mosuo tra...

Here is a short documentary -part of the series Portrait of a Beijinger - produced by Abel Blanco, featuring a self-taught Peking opera performer who specializes as a nandan , or man who performs female roles on stage.  The nandan , as the cross-gender role in Chinese Opera is one of the most interesting and most challenging. It has a long history and tradition dating to feudal China more than 1,000 years ago when women were not allowed to perform onstage, so male actors had to fill the female roles in Chinese operas. This was popularized with Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 Chinese drama movie. The roles became well-known in Peking Opera after the emergence of the Famous Four Nandans in the early 20th century. They included Mei Lanfang (1884-1961), whose youngest son Mei Baojiu, also a famous nandan, died recently. Through song, speech, stylized movement, makeup, and costume, the nandan artists transform themselves into maidens, dowagers, prostitutes, and women warriors. To ...

In March 2015 I had just started researching and photographing the cult of Mother Goddesses in Hanoi, and was introduced once again to the ancient art of Ca Tr�. I had attended one of its performances already during one of my photo expeditions in 2012. The performances were held in a small, but very atmospheric, old Vietnamese house on Hanoi's Hang Buom Street. It is during these performances that I met Ms. �?ng Th? Hu?ng, a Ca Tr� singer and musician, who played the traditional Vietnamese three-stringed lute, amongst other instruments. She was keen to be photographed in a traditional Vietnamese dress at a different venue such, and we chose �?n Ng?c Son, the Temple of the Jade Mountain, on Lake Hoan Kiem. Ca Tr� (pronounced �ka tchoo�) is a complex form of sung poetry found in the north of Viet Nam using lyrics written in traditional Vietnamese poetic forms. It flourished in the 15th century when it was popular with the royal palace, and was a favorite activity of aristocrats and s...