POLLY BRADEN

with essays by David Campany & Jennifer Higgie

China Between is a photographic exploration of the modern city culture of contemporary China.

When the Peoples’ Republic set up its Special Economic Zones in the 1980s communist China entered into global trade and international capital. The goal was financial but new money also brought new values and new ways of life. Polly Braden’s photography is an intimate response to the material and psychological effects of the changes experienced by the country’s new urban class. Shot over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, China Between is a revelatory portrait. No longer will images of epic scenes dominate our viewof this country. Braden shows how a casual glance, a moment of doubt or a quick trip to the shopping mall can tell us as much about modern China as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce.

… anthropological documents and a personal travelogue; a series of intimate portraits and, more generally, studies of a country undergoing a massive transition from a predominantly agrarian to an urban culture. – Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine

A winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize (2003) and The Guardian Newspaper Young Photographer of the Year (2002), Polly Braden has exhibited at venues internationally including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (USA). In recent years she has produced extended photo-essays in the UK, the Middle East, Morocco, Kenya and China and her photography has appeared in The Guardian, The Saturday Telegraph magazine, Ei8ht magazine, Portfolio, ICON, Photoworks, Frieze, The Sydney Morning Herald and D Magazine (Italy). Now based in London, Polly has lived in China and photographed the country over the last decade.

The book is accompanied by texts by David Campany, Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, London and by Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine.

ISBN: 978-1-904587-88-0
Hardback, 96 pages
63 colour photographs
297mm x 245mm