24 Mails from the Railway by Cheng Xinhao. Published by Jiazazhi.
This a melancholic and delightfully personal book documents a nineteen-day and 465-kilometre walk taken by the photographer and visual anthropologist Cheng Xinhao along the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway. Setting out from Kunming in the Yunnan province to his destination on the China-Vietnam border, the artist picked up a stone from the railway tracks each kilometre and collected them in his backpack, gradually weighing himself down. This small journal-like book contains twenty-four letters written during the walk-in which he ruminates on his childhood growing up in that region, the history of French colonisation in East-Asia, the physical challenges of his exploits, his dreams, and of the rapid modernisation that he witnesses along the way that seems to define contemporary China. The project is part-book, part-photography, part-performance — with a fifty-minute accompanying video available to view on his website. This is an incredibly intricate and engaging body of work that comes together perfectly in a simple book form — and meaningfully taps into layered geographical imaginations of place, of memory, of moving through space, and of stories made by walking.
Daniel Boetker-Smith is the Dean of Studies at Photography Studies College in Melbourne, Australia’s only dedicated photographic higher education institution. He is Director of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, and a contributor to FOAM Magazine, British Journal of Photography, GUP Magazine, European Photography, Voices of Photography, and other Australian and international publications.
dbs.dunked.com
@photobookarchive
@dboetkers