Seeing many Chinas through a single lens

A photographer is a remarkable phenomenon. Looking at the same thing alongside him, we become aware that though we certainly looked, unlike him we did not see.

So says Jean Daniel, member of the board of the Louvre art gallery in Paris and former correspondent for The New Republic in Washington and Le Monde, in the introduction to a new book, Marc Riboud in China: Forty years of Photography, showing remarkable shots that indicate how China has changed - and in some cases, how it has not - from 1957.

The pictures, all black and white, were taken during innumerable strolls through cities and villages and through times from Mao Zedong's early, hope-filled rule, through his tyranny, to the dollar's rule today.

That modern profit-making wave also awakened old beliefs that Mao forbade, Riboud writes. 'Is it fair to say, then, that in China everything moves and nothing changes?' Riboud uses this idea for the central chapter of three in which he opposes images of different times. There are women in Mao suits and mini-skirt, illiterate farm workers and white-coated electronics staff, revolutionaries and pop stars, farm fields and shiny new bridges. These are sandwiched between chapters on old China and the smart new version.

Sometimes the dates and images appear contradictory. A picture of a miner near Taiyuan posing with his shovel in a quilt-filled coat torn to shreds after many years of wear was taken in 1995; over the page, a woman posing nude on a pedestal in a sculpture gallery was shot in 1957.

Riboud joined the French Resistance when he was 20, then trained as an engineer before taking up photography in 1951 and travelling to Asia in 1955. Since then he has visited many times to produce a wonderful collection of shots that show there is no one China, but many Chinas.