Shanghai the eclectic. Shanghai XXL (extra-large). Sluggish beehive of almost thirty million inhabitants and thirty km in diameter. Techno-financial and fashionable midpoint of modern China. Divided exactly on half between cosmopolitan worldliness and ancestral practices; crowded with kitsch replicas of the symbolism of the envied Western modernity, which coexist with a more tarnished, implicit ideological symbolism. The economic capital of the People’s Republic amazed me more than any other megalopolis, I would say fascinated me.

As much as can happen for a place that remains difficult to imagine beyond literature and anecdotes. An opportunity seized on with enormous curiosity and attraction, for a world that I would say is largely unknown, as well as incomprehensible, to us Westerners. We are the past; they are a modern mass turbo-technological society moving towards a future with somewhat disturbing aspects. This is the feeling I brought back.

As it often happens to me, I started with a certain idea of a photographic project, which completely changed down in the field. It also happened to HCB, in 1948. He went there with a specific directive and dictated intentions. But his reportage became famous for something entirely different. There were some snapshots he came across while walking through the streets (roads) due to an unexpected event of historical significance (theGold Rush”: the race to the currency exchange among the middle class of the commercial metropolis at the time of the transition from the nationalist Kuomintang government to Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China).

Thus, that initial, diligent idea of reportage dissolved, shattered to multiply, day after day, street by street, into a thousand surprising unexpected subjects: architecture, scenes and proscenium, circumstances and characters. Images taken blending among people, on its streets.

So, testimony, story. Definitely street photography; of what, as I walk, intrigues me more, for the aesthetics, for the amazement and uniqueness of what has never been seen before. Facts that are «… expressed precisely in external episodes, in other words road episodes» (GBG).