A recent trip to Shanghai reminds me how popular the rediscovery of historic photographs of China remains. Here in one shop on Fuzhou lu, Shanghai’s bookstore street, is a good stash of Lao Zhaopian magazine, which sparked off the ‘Lao zhaopian re’ — ‘the old photographs fever’ (craze) of recent years. Other shops were well equipped with stocks of ‘then and now’ surveys, as well as the street photography of people like Lu Yuanmin 陆元敏. Next to the blue book below is a copy of The Streets of the Past 消逝的老街 by Kaihara Shuhei 海原修平, an evocative portrayal through a wide-angle lens camera of Shanghai’s very recent past, 1996-2000: almost wholly a different city. Historic can be relative.
Copies of the magazine Lao zhaopian (Old Photographs) in a Fuzhou road bookstore, Shanghai, February 2014 (photograph by Robert Bickers