Delorme’s Shanghai Totem Images

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French photographer Alain Delorme has captured some incredible shots during the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, where Delorme wondered around the city away from the modern skyscrapers and the clean streets and deep into the suburbs surrounding the developed central, capturing the daily movements of the “floating population” .

Delorme captured Chinese migrant workers, as they shift cargoes of goods, recycling materials, chairs and bottles in and out of the city to make a living. Subjects spread out between the ever-changing urban temporalities: the daily newspaper, the ceaseless movement of the passers by, the building sites and the new buildings, which all falls under a slow rhythm.

Behind the balance of these compositions, Delorme breaks the rules of the documentary kind, playing with the assembly and the color to present a kind of “hyper reality” which highlights the paradoxes of the most dynamic city of China.

Inside these incredibly cultural-rich photos, Delorme also captures the individuality of the workers, whereas the common depiction of the Chinese work force has largely been a faceless mass.The author urges us to see the workers as they contribute to the growing consumerism in which they do not benefit from themselves.

Alain Delorme reactualizes the documentary proposal here which is based on the contrast between the form and of the representation, with the bright advertising colors, and the subjects of his depiction to underline this variation.

These men become the superheroes of the new world whose force seems multiplied by ten. They are believed capable of all the prowesses, maintaining balance of their random and strange burdens with dexterity.

Layers upon layers, thousand-year-old China côtoie contemporary industrial power is matched by the ordinary worker’s totems. The race is not only among the men in the city, but also that of the city towards its future.

BTW, I originally saw these images in the Air France airline magazine which inspired me to go digging on the web.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above summarized, reposted and taken from prettynoize.blogspot.com.

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