Recently, I watched a video of Lijiang and discovered how dramatically life has changed over the past twenty-five years. This discovery prompted me to assemble the current collection of portraits. “A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there, put together end to end; that never makes more than one, or two seconds wrung from eternity” (Robert Doisneau). The challenge, for me, was to gather sufficient seconds, from varying perspectives, to begin to understand the Chinese.

China Portraits and Reflections presents my response to that challenge.