Migrant Community, Shanghai 2006 by Spring HS Daniel Traub

Daniel Traub
Currently residing in New York, NY

website: http://www.danieltraub.net

Work Statement
City's Edge

I am drawn to the peripheries of China's cities - the strange and nebulous region where urban and rural China meet. This landscape is emblematic of China as a whole: unresolved, abrasive , contradictory. Here, the wealthiest Chinese live in 'Mc Mansions' - cookie-cutter villas beside migrant workers who can only afford to erect shanties on temporarily vacant land. We see manicured lawns and golf courses extravagantly watered next to parched farmland and polluted dumping grounds.

There is a stage-set quality to the built environment. The architecture seems two-dimensional, garish and impermanent. There are plastic palm trees, Greco-Roman columns, billboards showing American football players, advertisements for dazzling new apartment complexes, bunkers left from WWII and ancient tombs. The people with their gestures seem theatrical, as if eager to appear in step with these new backdrops. Others seem absorbed in their thoughts, lonely, stunned by this new world that has suddenly appeared.

In photographing this phenomena, I ask certain questions: what will develop from this mix of cultural traditions and symbols? Will something distinct and authentic emerge? I search for awkward moments and juxtapositions, scenes in which elements coalesce to offer a glimpse of something new and undefined. Photographing this environment becomes a way of gazing back into history as well as a method of decoding the future, with its possibilities and dangers.

Bio
Daniel Traub is an American photographer and filmmaker that has been based in China since 1999. As a photographer he has been engaged with long term projects including a body of work entitled Simplified Characters which explores the transformation of China's cities through street portraits and urban scenes and the large format series City's Edge which looks at the border region where urban and rural China meet. His images have been exhibited in Asia and the United States and have appeared in various publications including the New York Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine and Wallpaper*.

Traub received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1994 and received an MFA in Photography from School of Visual Arts, New York in 1998 where he studied with Joel Sternfeld and Raghubir Singh.