China Between is a photographic essay on the modern city culture of contemporary China. When the Peoples’ Republic set up its Special Economic Zones in the 1980s communist China entered into global trade and international capital. The goal was financial but new money also brought new values and new ways of life. Polly Braden’s photography is an intimate response to the material and psychological effects of the changes experienced by the country’s new urban class. Shot over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, China Between is a revelatory portrait. Braden shows how a casual glance, a moment of doubt or a quick trip to the shopping mall can tell us as much about modern China as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce.

It was in the mid-1990s while she was living in the town of Yangzhou (where Mao was born) that Polly Braden first took up photography. Making sense of the camera and making sense of China have gone hand in hand. Since then she has amassed a huge archive of images, some made on assignment for magazines but most made speculatively. Although there have been plenty of great shots along the way China Between is not simply a collection of extraordinary images. It has taken most of those years to find the right photographic approach and the majority of images presented here were made in the last three years.  What she was trying to discover, without fully knowing it for a long while, was a form of observing, shooting and editing that might express the complicated relation between everyday life in China’s burgeoning cities and the great transformations that have been taking place there.

— David Campany, writer and curator

These photographs are at once anthropological documents and a personal travelogue; a series of intimate portraits and, more generally, studies of a country undergoing a massive transition from a predominantly agrarian to an urban culture.

— Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine

Stumbling into London’s Square Mile  - the heart of the powerful financial district – you could lose your way within minutes. Public streets blur into private forecourts. Seductive passages become corporate cul-de-sacs of soaring glass, steel and stone. Much of the new City architecture has a preening bravado. These are offices built to look great in photographs.  Each new London landmark is launched on a wave of computer generated anticipation, reducing the public city to publicity. But in the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings. Whether or not we wish to, we just don’t mirror these facades.

To a newcomer the City looks impenetrable, like an oiled machine with a hidden logic. City folk might seem coolly efficient but it’s an illusion. Look again and many of them seem out of their element, as if caught between one air-conditioned sanctuary and the next. These are not employees ‘on message’. There is doubt and indecision in their gestures. Others are not dressed for the office at all but residents from the housing estates.

Something of the essence of the City is visible here: the telling gap between official power and the lived experience of flesh and blood. This is a modern England bathed in a light more typical of American street photography. There is no long lens involved. The City teems with people, but selecting just one can feel unbearably intimate. As a locus of power this place voyeur in us, and this is part of the appeal. To look, or more accurately to watch without being seen is a part of what defines metropolitan life. But these photographs are looking for some measure of humanity. To be a voyeur is not always anti-social. It can be very different from the cold gaze of the ubiquitous surveillance camera or the miscreant, more guardian angel than opportunist gazer. CCTV catches every second of every day in the high security Square Mile but it misses the things that really matter.

Text by David Campany

Orbis is committed to eliminating avoidable blindness in developing countries through hands-on training, public health education and improved access to eye care for those who are most disadvantaged. They work in partnership with institutions in developing nations so that they can provide services to patients in the long-term.

They have worked closely with Islamia Eye Hospital and through this partnership they can now provide ocular care in rural areas such as Jamalpur, Barisal and Naogan through Islamia’s team of doctors and nurses.

A collaboration between Polly Braden & David CampanyThe River Lea runs from the Thames in east London up to Hertfordshire. Once a busy commercial waterway, it is now a nature reserve and leisure area. From the planned site for the 2012 Olympic Games it passes industrial estates, sports centres, new build homes and council estates.

Working together, Braden & Campany move between observational documentary and experimental stagings. There are poetic snapshots and theatrical incidents, naturalistic portraits and semi-fictional enactments. Responding to the strange beauty they find the photographs reflect the place but also reflect upon the processes and conventions of documentary at the same time.

Escape from the city; the reinvention of social spaces; the attraction of water; the meeting of different cultures; the persistence of nature. The project weaves together its motifs, building a complex description of the past, present and future of this half-forgotten thread of land.

Adventures in the Valley is an ongoing project. It was shown as a 150 image, 15 minute digital slideshow at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London as part of the programme London in Six Easy Steps, Summer 2005.

A beautiful photo essay, Adventures in the Valley filled one wall of the group show Real Estate; it was the most powerful piece in the show. Polly Braden and David Campany spent a year in the Lea Valley , part of which is to become the 2012 Olympic Village. Part nature reserve, part post-industrial concrete wilderness, the valley has had the good fortune to have been ignored by developers; its extraordinary vistas, with Canary Wharf looming over its shoulder, are captured in the 100 or so shots that slow-dissolve into one another. Between the pylons, gasworks, abandoned depots, defunct electricity-generating station and acres of meadowland, the inhabitants of the valley have forged their own little city of allotments, play areas and small businesses (300 of which will be given notice to quit).

Braden and Campany describe this landscape as one of “intimate chaos”. Someone has spray-painted “fuck Seb Coe” on a metal bridge across one of the Lea tributaries, where wildfowl are flourishing. The centre of what will be the Olympic Stadium is currently a beautiful tangle of wild flowers and weeds, seen here in weak winter sunlight. The Lea Valley has been a local place for local people, but there is no angry Little Englandism about the photos, nor any sentimentality – just a pervasive melancholy.

— Sarah Wise, The Guardian, September 1, 2005