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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright The Economist

Larry Devlin was America’s man in Africa. Nearly half a century after he arrived in Kinshasa, the fabled former Congo station chief tells his side of the story
Corbis

IF ONE man personified the cold war in Africa—that ruinous contest between the greatest powers in the world’s weakest states—it was Larry Devlin. Smart, ambitious and hard as bullets, a second-world-war veteran who equated communists with Nazis, he was one of the CIA’s first station chiefs in Congo, where he arrived just days after it was made independent by Belgium in 1960—at two weeks’ notice.

There was chaos there already. Soldiers lynched their Belgian officers and hunted for white women to rape. The newly elected government, led by Patrice Lumumba, a former postal worker and petty crook, was paralysed and clueless. Because of mutineers at the airport Mr Devlin reached Kinshasa, Congo’s riverside capital, in a small boat from nearby Congo-Brazzaville: a classic voyage of modern Africa, since taken by countless spooks, fugitive politicians, rebel invaders, diamond smugglers, mercenaries and journalists, during Congo’s many meltdowns.

Mr Devlin and his masters have been blamed for much of Congo’s awful history, which culminated, between 1996 and 2002, in two wars that claimed several million lives. And there is good reason to blame them; to keep the Russians out of Africa, they did dreadful deeds.

Lumumba took help from the Soviet Union, having been influenced by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Africa’s independence leaders, and by Belgium’s efforts to split the new Congo and control its richest part. So Mr Devlin plotted with the country’s army chief, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, a recently promoted sergeant, to have the prime minister arrested. When Lumumba continued to cause problems and Congo collapsed into civil war, President Dwight Eisenhower personally ordered his assassination, according to Mr Devlin. A CIA agent, a chemist codenamed “Joe from Paris”, turned up in Kinshasa with poisons, including one concealed in a tube of toothpaste, with which Mr Devlin was to perform this act. He never did. Lumumba was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1961, by his Congolese rivals and their Belgian allies, probably with America’s acquiescence. He remains an important symbol to Africans, and socialists everywhere, of resistance to Western imperialism.

As Congo’s crisis continued, Mr Devlin encouraged Mobutu (pictured above) to launch a coup in 1965. In his defence—the main purpose of this memoir, which he has written after enduring decades of abuse for his professional misdeeds—Mr Devlin says he was not directly involved in the coup. Maybe not; though Mobutu consulted him before and after it, and allowed him to help pick his first cabinet.

America was delighted with its new ally against communism: Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (“the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”), as Sergeant Joseph renamed himself. He also renamed Congo as Zaire, and ruled it as his personal fief for 32 years. He was popular at first, uniting the country and righting the economy. He made Zaireans proud to have such a leader. But by the mid-1970s Zaire had become a kleptocracy, consuming massive Western aid and its own assets. During two stints as Congo station chief, Mr Devlin did much to help create this nightmare, conniving with Mobutu and his allies, confounding their enemies. In 1974, after quitting the agency, he returned to Congo to work for Maurice Tempelsman, an enigmatic diamond dealer and companion, in her final years, to Jacqueline Onassis.

Mr Devlin’s was an unsavoury career. But so was that of any successful cold-war spy. His adventures, which he tells quite well, included dodging cannibal mutineers and murderous Western mercenaries; surviving numerous mock executions; and driving around Kinshasa with a rigid corpse sticking out of his trunk. Had it not been for the Church Committee, which was formed by the Senate in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses, including its involvement in Lumumba’s killing, Mr Devlin would always have been considered a hero; he was decorated for valour for his spying during the Vietnam war.

It is wrong to demonise the old warrior. But cold-war politics helped create the calamity that is Congo, and much of Africa, today. It will fall to less partial historians than Mr Devlin to decide whether the risk of Africa falling to communism justified the terrible cost the continent has paid.

Posted at 2:17 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright City Journal

Virtue and Terror, by Maximilien Robespierre (Verso, 160 pp., $14.95) and On Practice and Contradiction, by Mao Zedong (Verso, 160 pp., $14.95)

These two books appear in a new series, “Revolutions,” published by Verso, a well-known British firm specializing in radical leftist gobbledygook. The books come with introductions by Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian psychoanalyst and social theorist, who assaults both the English language and the intelligence of those who actually manage to figure out what he’s saying.

If you think that’s harsh, here’s a representative Žižekian sentence: “The claim that the people does exist is the basic axiom of ‘totalitarianism,’ and the mistake of ‘totalitarianism’ is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse (‘paralogism’) of political reason: ‘the People exists’ through a determinate political agent which acts as if it directly embodies (not only re-presents) the People, its true Will (the totalitarian Party and its Leader), i.e. in the terms of transcendental critique, as a direct phenomenal embodiment of the noumenal People.” Got that? The advertising that accompanies the two books says that “only a philosophical voice so profoundly attuned to the dissonances of our age as Slavoj Žižek’s could do justice to the great revolutionary texts of modernity.” In a way it’s true: Žižek’s matchless prose is a fitting introduction to these abhorrent volumes.

Maximilien Robespierre led the phase of the French Revolution called the Terror. It lasted a little over a year. He gave the orders that resulted in beheading, drowning, shooting, or burying alive about 20,000 men, women, and children. Mao Zedong ruled China between 1949 and his death in 1976. During his tenure, his followers murdered, on a low estimate, 20 million people. These two men were among the handful of great mass murderers of modern times, in the same class as Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot, and Stalin.

Both Robespierre and Mao seized control of and radicalized revolutions that they did not start. In each case, the revolution destroyed the previous corrupt regime and replaced it with hell on earth. Instead of their predecessors’ venality, Robespierre and Mao sought ideological purity, and they had a cold impersonal hatred of those whom they suspected of not sharing their crazed theories. This hatred brought them to murder people indiscriminately, not for what they did but for what they were. Innocence was no part of Robespierre’s or Mao’s vocabulary; the notion that punishment should be for real crimes, both men thought, was subversive of the grandiose project of achieving happiness for all. Their ideologies dictated the only way to reach that lofty goal; those who disagreed with their ideologies became enemies of mankind, deserving only extermination.

Robespierre was half-educated, Mao not at all. Both were charismatic and fanatical. Robespierre’s ideology derived from Rousseau, Mao’s from Marx. They borrowed what they could from these thinkers, treated their derivative beliefs as incontestable truths, never questioned themselves, and ignored readily available criticisms. Robespierre and Mao were monsters, but they exacerbated their monstrosity by sophistical self-righteousness.

They were also mind-numbingly tedious in their writings and speeches, in which they deduced policies from their ideologies—and in which, undeterred by the disastrous failure of these policies, they just deduced more policies. The books under review, two of the “great revolutionary texts of modernity,” collect some of these deductions. We get from Robespierre such gems as “terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Mao teaches us that “by civil rights, we mean, politically, the rights of freedom and democracy. But this freedom is freedom with leadership and this democracy is democracy under centralized guidance … democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries is the people’s democratic dictatorship.” As for who provided the “centralized guidance,” and who the “reactionaries” were and what happened to them, well …

In view of the past, present, and no doubt future horrors that ideologues will inflict on the world, it’s important to understand their mentality. What are they thinking when they order the killing of untold numbers of innocents? Don’t they see the bodies? Are they devoid of all feeling for human suffering? The answer is that they view the facts through the grotesquely distorting prism of ideology. They see, not mangled bodies, but dead enemies; not innocent victims, but obstacles to universal bliss. And in themselves, they see not monstrous evildoers, but benefactors of humanity.

Click the link below for the complete article.

Posted at 3:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
(see the link below for the complete article.)

American movies and music have done very well in some countries, like Sweden, and less well in others, like India. This may sound like a simple difference in human tastes, but choices about culture also have an economic aspect.

Loyalties to cultural goods and services — be it heavy metal music or the opera — are about social networking and choosing an identity and an aspiration. That is, we use culture to connect with other people and to define ourselves; both are, to some extent, economic decisions. The continuing and indeed growing relevance of local economic connections suggests that “cultural imperialism” will not prove to be the dominant trend.

Local culture commands loyalty when people are involved in networks of status and caste, and they pursue religious and communal markers of identity. Those individuals use local cultural products to signal their place in hierarchies.

An Indian Muslim might listen to religious Qawwali music to set himself apart from local Hindus, or a native of Calcutta might favor songs from Bengali cinema. The Indian music market is 96 percent domestic in origin, in part because India is such a large and multifaceted society. Omar Lizardo, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, explains this logic in his recent paper “Globalization and Culture: A Sociological Perspective.”

Today, economic growth is booming in countries where American popular culture does not dominate, namely India and China. Population growth is strong in many Islamic countries, which typically prefer local music and get their news from sources like the satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

The combination of these trends means that American entertainment, for largely economic reasons, will lose relative standing in the global marketplace. In fact, Western culture often creates its own rivals by bringing creative technologies like the recording studio or the printing press to foreign lands.

American popular culture tends to be popular when people interact with others from around the world and seek markers of global identity.

My stepdaughter spent last summer studying French in Nice, with students from many other countries. They ate and hung out at McDonald’s, a name and symbol they all share, even though it was not everyone’s favorite meal.

Globalization is most likely to damage local culture in regions like Scandinavia that are lightly populated, not very hierarchical and looking for new global cultural symbols. But the rest of the world’s population is in countries — China and India, of course, but also Brazil, Mexico, Egypt and Indonesia — that do not fit that description.

“American” cultural products rely increasingly on non-American talent and international symbols and settings. “Babel,” which won this year’s Golden Globe award for best drama, has a Mexican director and is set in Morocco, Japan and Mexico, mostly with non-English dialogue.

Posted at 2:53 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Viewing Two Chinas From a Stop on the Silk Road

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

GLOBALIZATION has always been a dodgy term. As a clever neologism, it flatters our need to believe that the times we inhabit offer something truly new. Pause to think about it more clearly, though, and even a basic knowledge of geography or history turns up examples in almost every corner of the globe of the kinds of intercourse that turns global into globalization.

Better yet, there are places like Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis town in the far west of China, where for centuries great swaths of disparate peoples have come together in a jumble just about as colorful as one could want or imagine.

My first experience of this came just yards from my hotel door on the groggy first morning of my stay in November. Groggy because I had flown there from Shanghai the night before, which meant seven hours in the air and a change of planes in Urumqi, the booming capital of China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

Why bother coming to Kashgar at all, you might ask, given that it is neither the most obvious nor accessible choice for an additional stop beyond, say, Beijing or Shanghai on your average China trip itinerary?

For one thing, this city has few rivals in China for longevity when it comes to defining what it means to be a crossroads.

For at least two millenniums, Kashgar was one of the most prosperous market cities on what eventually became known as the Silk Road. Caravans of camels sometimes stretching for miles made their way through its walls, carrying silk or spices, silver and gold between East and West.

Separated from Pakistan by the Karakoram mountain range, whose 15,500-foot Khunjerab Pass is the world’s highest paved border crossing, this area was also one of Islam’s main points of entry into China. Ever traditionalist, conservative Kashgar remains perhaps the most important Islamic center for Chinese Muslims today.

The best answer to the question of why travel to China’s westernmost city, though, is the visceral response you get from plunging into Kashgar’s streets, as I did that first morning with my guide, Abdul. We made our way into the heart of the old city, once protected by an imposing earthen wall, whose sloping remains can still be seen.

As you leave the wide boulevards of modern Kashgar behind and ascend a small hillside lane, the jolt you receive constitutes one of the most powerful feelings that travel can provide — of leaving one world and entering another. In Kashgar’s case it is a matter of a few yards from the familiar China of onrushing modernization to places that, but for a few details — like the occasional car nosing its way through streets thick with merchants and foot traffic — seem scarcely touched by time.

The high, old brick walls of closely spaced houses pressed in on us. Bearded men huddled in conversation, some working their prayer beads as they listened. A man in a battered barber’s chair sat inclined, had his face lathered and massaged vigorously, and then was shaved with a straight razor.

A little way ahead, a clutch of women in veils approached, the first evidence of what I came to understand as a general rule here: once a woman is beyond her 20s, the veil is pretty much standard attire. That befits a place where in most old neighborhoods there is a mosque every hundred yards or so.

I knocked on the door at one and was welcomed by the friendly man with a beard combed to a fine white point. He was both groundskeeper and muezzin, or caller to prayer, and he sat with us for an hour, offering tea and then turning on the naked lanterns in the pillared and hitherto dark main prayer hall. The light revealed beautiful blue ceramic tiles at the altar etched with calligraphic prayers and a proud smile on the face of our host.

China’s Uighur minority, which is the largest ethnic group in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, is almost entirely Sunni, and is subjected to very tight controls by a government wary of both terrorism and of longstanding separatist sentiments.

At the end of our visit with him, the muezzin climbed the rough cement staircase to a platform linking his twin minarets, explaining that it was from there that he called the faithful to prayer. What he didn’t explain, careful to be discreet, is that the government doesn’t allow the use of loudspeakers or megaphones, as is common in many Islamic countries.

At a small junction in the road, we came across a crowd of men standing engaged in a lively discussion. I wondered if there had been an incident but was told that they were making preparations for a wedding.

Around the corner, next to a bakery where freshly made flatbread lay cooling on an iron grill, a group of women — the female half of the wedding party — stood discussing their own arrangements.

When I turned the next corner in this maze of narrow streets, there was yet another discovery: Stalin lives. Or at least Stalin knickknacks do. All over China one can also find Mao memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution, from Little Red Books to pins and banners emblazoned with the Great Helmsman’s image. Here, though, was a shopkeeper in a little hole in the wall. He had hung a vintage poster of Uncle Joe beaming confidently in front of his shop. It served as an appropriate reminder of the region’s geography.

Indeed, as much as a Silk Road outpost, Kashgar was one of the main stalking grounds of the Great Game, as the shadowy competition between Russia and Britain for power and influence in Central Asia came to be called. The rival powers chose Kashgar as their listening posts for Afghanistan, India, China and the Islamic underbelly of the Russian empire, and from here each employed diplomat-spies to plot their moves from rival consulates.

In Kashgar today, as in much of China, one gets the impression that a very intense war has been waged on the country’s cultural and tourism assets.

Signs of genuine local culture are so often poorly preserved, when they have not been destroyed altogether. China deserves credit for its formidable achievement of development, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a generation, but in most places the price for this has been the imposition of generic forms that are often tasteless and sometimes hideous.

Because of its remoteness, Kashgar is behind the curve, and for once that’s good. But even Kashgar is coming under the pressure of Chinese-style homogenization, though, and that’s another reason to visit soon.

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Posted at 9:10 AM · Comments (0)

Published: February 20 2007 - Copyright The Financial Times

Flicking on the television at midnight in Beijing recently, I came across a football match. It was Manchester United versus Charlton Athletic - broadcast live from Old Trafford with commentary in Chinese.

My first thought was not, “What’s the score?” but - “Soft power”. Doubtless my reaction reflected an excessive intake of books on international relations. But soft power is a fashionable notion in Beijing these days as China seeks to manage its “peaceful rise”.

The idea of soft power - invented by Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor - is that countries can often best achieve their objectives by persuasion rather than force. While the instruments of “hard” power are military and economic, the instruments of soft power are cultural and ideological.

I found it encouraging that the Chinese seem to have developed a passion for English football; a positive image that might displace some old grudges about the opium war.

Now the Chinese themselves are increasingly interested in developing soft power. The government in Beijing knows that many countries are anxious about a rising China. But if China looks like an attractive and friendly place, foreigners might be more relaxed about its growing power.

The thought that China could be a “soft superpower” sounds improbable. The Chinese government’s most iconic act of recent years was to murder large numbers of its citizens. It was American soft power that was displayed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, as students brandished a model of the Statue of Liberty. Chinese economic growth, while undeniably impressive, is widely associated in the west with pollution, cheap labour and a threat to jobs.

For a rich, free and culturally powerful country such as the US to lose a soft power contest with China seems all but impossible. It would be like losing a boxing match with a one-armed man. But in the global battle for hearts and minds, China does have one distinct advantage. It has not started any wars lately.

The catastrophic decline in the international image of the US since the Iraq war is increasingly evident. An international opinion survey for the BBC this month showed that 52 per cent of the 26,000 surveyed now have a “mainly negative” view of the US, up from 47 per cent last year. Even in Europe, America’s image is barely better than that of China. A survey of 12 European nations for the German Marshall Fund last year showed that America had a popularity rating of 48 out of 100; China got 45.

But it is in the developing world that China may have the best opportunity to project its soft power. Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean intellectual, argues that China’s extraordinary rise from poverty to prosperity can serve as an inspiration for other countries that are “in despair”.

China has more than an uplifting story to offer. It also promotes an alternative theory of development and international relations. Joshua Cooper Ramo, a consultant, christened this the “Beijing consensus” in 2004. He argued that developing nations were increasingly fed up with the doctrinaire “Washington consensus” - and increasingly impressed by a Chinese model that emphasised pragmatism, innovation, social cohesion and self-determination.

Joshua Kurzlantzick, an American analyst, warns that Chinese “soft power” in southeast Asia is now so potent that for the first time since 1945, the US is “facing a situation in which another country’s appeal outstrips its own in an important region”. China’s aid to the Philippines is now four times as generous as that offered by America; twice as many Indonesians are now studying in China as are studying in the US. China is promoting a free-trade area with southeast Asia.

In the past month, China has been able to point to a couple of successes for its charm offensive. A tour of Africa by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, underlined his country’s growing influence there. And the negotiation of a nuclear deal with North Korea looks like a vindication for China’s emphasis on quiet negotiation with “rogue states”, rather than America’s hitherto more confrontational approach.

But just as the idea of a “Beijing consensus” is gaining ground, Mr Cooper Ramo has returned to the fray with some dissonant data. In a new pamphlet called Brand China (Foreign Policy Centre), he takes a much less optimistic view of China’s image. Using global opinion research conducted by Young & Rubicam, Mr Ramo now concludes that “China’s brand is weak. The country is not trusted overseas.”

Even some of the more vaunted examples of Chinese “soft power” can easily be turned on their heads. The Chinese may get on famously with the governments of Sudan and Zimbabwe, but such relationships are only likely to confirm the damaging impression that China is a country that will always put profits above human rights. Seen in this light, China’s growing influence in Africa and even southeast Asia has little to do with a new “Beijing consensus” - it is simply old-fashioned power politics.

Mr Nye, the original theorist of soft power, sees obvious limitations to China’s charm offensive. The Chinese model, he argues, is only likely to work in “places where an authoritarian model of rapid development is attractive”. What is more, the US is better placed to polish up its image than China. Surveys regularly suggest that American society retains much of its international appeal; it is US foreign policy that has provoked a backlash. By contrast, Chinese foreign policy excites little hostility - outside Japan and Taiwan. It is the Chinese political and social system that worries foreigners. It is much easier to change your policies than to change your political system.

Does image matter? It is gratifying if foreigners like your films or your football. But Manchester had more impact on the world when it was the centre of the industrial revolution than the headquarters of a soccer team. Chinese and American hawks would probably agree that, when it comes to the crunch, hard power matters much more than soft stuff.

But the crunch - fortunately - may never come. In the meantime, if China and the US clash, it will be over issues such as Sudan, Iran or climate change - and the struggle is likely to be played out at the United Nations, or in a battle for world opinion. In that struggle, soft power - mushy and difficult to define as it is - really does matter.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Posted at 1:48 AM · Comments (0)

This is from Mike Johnston, a very fine writer on cameras (and music and hi-fi gear).
Click to See his blog: The Online Photographer

(In truth, lens connoisseurship can sometimes actively interfere with photography…I’ve become so good at detecting the visual cues of aberrations that I zero in on them all too quickly when looking at pictures, and I personally find it very difficult to find lenses I’m wholly satisfied with.) Secondly, I have come to deplore “drinking wine by the label,” and the eternal necessity of fighting against snobbism, prejudice (the word in its literal sense, of “judging in advance”), and a phenomenon I don’t have a name for, the hardened tendency of so many consumers to believe that more expensive things must be better (and their assumption that I—rather than they—must have some ulterior motive if I don’t automatically accept that view).

The post goes on to identify his favorite 50mm lens, the new Zeiss Planar T, and to make a nod to the 50 I own, the Konica M-Hexanon.
You can see its handiwork here:

Click to see images

Posted at 6:46 PM · Comments (0)

For anyone who has traveled or who likes to think about how the world is put together, this is fantastic history, well-written and accessible, full of unexpected insights.
I was struck, in particular by the discussions of the Silk Road, about which I’ve read quite a bit; the Asian influence on Europe in the Middle Ages; internal exploration in Japan and China, notably Sichuan Province.
Great stuff. Indeed, I read it with the same kind of enthusiasm I brought to books about dinosaurs and planets when I was a child.

Posted at 1:14 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: February 15, 2007

LUSHAN, China — For as long as he can remember, Du Jianhua’s dream has been to find a way to contribute to society.

Starting small, Mr. Du, a glass cutter, began by cleaning up litter around this town. Later, he began tracking the way garbage was dumped into the Nansha River, fouling the waterway where he had played as a boy.

Soon he began looking into mining and deforestation in the hill country of Henan Province, where he grew up, and finally, he presented a report on his findings to the local government, hoping to spur it to act.

When the local environmental bureau dismissed him out of hand, he decided to form his own nongovernmental organization.

“This is when I realized that volunteers are weak in our society,” Mr. Du said. “No matter what we say, the government doesn’t listen, but just ridicules us. The only way forward is to form an organization and to unite with other groups.”

Over the next two years, Mr. Du, 37, built a local environmental group and then tried to have it officially registered. The quest for legal status was frustrated, however, leading to two lawsuits, both of which he lost.

But if the battle often seemed lonely, Mr. Du is anything but alone.

In 15 years, China has gone from having virtually no independent groups of any kind to more than 300,000 nongovernmental organizations, by official count. But that understates the true number. Counting unregistered groups, some estimates place the number as high as two million.

As Mr. Du’s experience attests, such activism has spread out of the big cities and well beyond the intellectual class that gave rise to the movement in the early 1990s. It has done so by taking on what were less risky issues like environmental protection and avoiding overt challenges to the government, like those that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

This explosion has begun to change the relationship between citizens and the government. Many activists say it has gradually pushed the authoritarian system in the direction of greater openness and accountability.

It has also aroused strong concerns within the government, with some officials warning that nongovernmental organizations could become Trojan horses for Western-style democratization.

Although they rarely use the word Western to describe their inspiration, many people in the movement acknowledge that gradual democratization is precisely the point.

“In the past, all decisions were made according to the government’s sole judgment,” said Wang Yongchen, a co-founder of the Green Earth Volunteers, one of the oldest organizations. “What we’re saying is not only the government, but the nongovernment sector, too, should participate in decision making so that broader public interests can be reflected in decisions.”

An important step was the environmental impact assessment law, which took effect in 2003 and for the first time provided for public hearings on construction projects. Mr. Du’s experience, however, is a sharp reminder of the powerful, and sometimes harsh, limits on pluralism or other forms of popular participation.

The government requires that for any group to become a legal entity, it first has to obtain sponsorship from a state agency. This requirement means that any group whose agenda is seen, rightly or wrongly, as provocative or adversarial stands little chance of registering.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:29 AM · Comments (0)

This site has been frustratingly out of service for the last few weeks as I fought through problems with a horrible host (MidPhase), switched to a new host and retooled some of the underlying software.
The good news is that these problems are behind me, and I can begin posting new material, and fielding your comments again.
There’s a lot going on, beginning with a trip to U-Cal Berkeley, where I’ll be a Regent’s lecturer during the week of February 26. I will also be showing my China photography there.
I’ve also got a new website in the works that will exclusively feature my documentary photography. Word on that soon.

Meanwhile, copies of “Disappearing Shanghai,” a catalog-bound selection of 50 prints from the October 2006 Berlin show of my Shanghai street photography are still available, although the supply is dwindling.

It’s $15 plus postage, and makes a nice coffee table item, beautifully produced. Email me at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com

Posted at 12:12 AM · Comments (0)

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