RICHARD MARK DOBSON
China Chromes
 
Shortly after the events of 1989, I arrived in China carrying little more than cameras, chrome film, and a growing curiosity about a country I had imagined since childhood.

What I encountered initially felt austere and monochrome — endless bicycles, winter light, dark clothing, vast grey streets, and the lingering atmosphere of a nation still largely closed to the outside world.

Throughout the early 1990s, assignments took me across large parts of China at a moment of profound transition, as older social structures and visual rhythms slowly gave way to rapid modernization.

These images, scanned from ageing 35mm slides, now function less as documentary records than fragments of memory. Their softened detail, colour shifts, dust, and material degradation seem inseparable from the fading world they depict.

Presented here as part of an ongoing archive, the work reflects both a personal journey and a vanished visual era — a China suspended somewhere between isolation, transformation, and recollection.

China Chromes 1990's
 China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's
 China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's
 China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's
 China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's
 China Chromes 1990's  China Chromes 1990's
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