Connor returns each time with a sense of urgency to photograph 'the disappearing China'. Streets she has pictured in Beijing are now gone. The hotungs and small shops are being gobbled up by development.

Like Atget who tried to possess, through his photography, all of old Paris, Connor would like to possess China, but knows it is an impossible task. Especially if you have to lug a turn-of-the-century banquet camera around plus over hundred pounds of equipment and film.

Connor's camera is a burden and a benefit. It draws a crowd of gawkers and slows her down, but she wants to slow down. 'I need time to understand what I'm looking at.' Her contemplation becomes ours: we pay attention to her 7 x 17 inch platinum prints and the almost microscopic detail she is able to freeze in the rush of life.

Even a quick look at her photographs shows this is not your usual travel photography. Balcony and hotungs crammed with the discards of urban life, a web of telephone lines - not your mail order exotica and the picturesque. 'I am not interested in illustration,' she says. 'I am interested in making a portrait.' Her goal is a portrait of China not a series of pristine landscapes. Her work is 'about people who put their marks on the land - the path humankind makes through the land'.

The marks that interest her range from the indelible to the fleeting, the monumental to the mundane - from the ruins of ancient cities and the immense terraced hills of Guangxi to a pile of chopsticks and a bowl on a balcony in Yangshuo.

Connor finds the poetry in prosaic daily life of a bamboo trellis, a fragile scaffolding, the jumble of rooftops, a Wan Chai construction site, exposed tree roots and a ploughed field. In much of her imagery is a fascination with 'the way things grow'.

Connor believes humans respond to the land around them in the buildings they make.

'Architecture,' she says, 'echoes the ancient fascination with nature'.

In one photograph, Longshan, Guangxi 1991, a solitary figure stands atop a hillside terrace looking over an immense valley. 'It clarifies what I got from Chinese painting: man's relation to nature - man has always been small.' This trip to China was barely for a week. But when she takes a sabbatical from Yale University in summer, she will spend a great deal of time in the land and among the people to which she has become bound.

Before she came to China, Connor had won prestigious fellowships and been in museum shows, but in China, 'I became a photographer. I found my voice in China'.

Strange in this increasingly global village, the endangered landscape of a changing China has found its conservator in a photographer from America.

China Stands Still - Platinum Prints by Lois Connor, Hanart TZ Gallery, until March 22