Make It Snappy: Finding Photogenic Beijing

On a bright Sunday morning in August, my spirits buoyed by one of those rare @BeijingAir tweets that actually pronounced the atmosphere to be “good,” I finally succumbed to a longstanding lust and bought myself a nice camera. With digital SLRs having gotten quite affordable, and with any dummy (e.g. me) able in principle to take decent pictures, I figured the time was right. I forked out my money for the Canon model I’ve been reading so much about online, and which came recommended by so many friends, and embarked on my latest modestly expensive hobby.

Since that day I’m rarely without the thing, annoying my children and coworkers as I experiment with different f-stops and ISOs. True, I was the same way with different yeasts and whole-wheat flours in the weeks after I bought my bread machine. In my defense, though, bread takes like five hours, and you can’t just delete failed loaves, or even keep giving them to your in-laws (which worked for a while before they got wise). Alas, poor bread machine: It was with no small pang of guilt that I conceded you no longer deserve your place of honor on the countertop by the rice steamer, and condemned you to the back of a cupboard.

Anyway, the camera and assorted peripherals are much more expensive and technically complex than the stupid bread machine, and therefore apt to keep my attention longer. This stuff really does add up. But I’ve devised a fiendish strategy to keep my wife from inquiring too closely about the cost of new lenses and flashes and Class 6 SD cards: taking lots and lots of pictures of her.

It’s a strategy I devised after years of observation of the relationship between Chinese women and photography. That relationship has, I’m glad to report, changed a great deal as photography has become so ubiquitous. But not so long ago, most of the pictures affixed to any given Beijing girl’s wall would have been of herself. In at least one of them her hand, palm down with fingers gracefully curved upward, would be cradling her chin; in another, she’d have the blossoming branch of some tree held to her cheek. That’s been replaced by the V fingers, which are only slightly less irksome. To be fair, American girls might not instinctively flash victory in the presence of a camera, but an alarming percentage do that pursed kissy-lips thing in the drunken bar or frat party photos that get posted to Facebook.

These things I find so funny are of course a vestige of a time in China when having your picture taken was a big deal, my wife reminds me, and it’s not fair to mock – especially for a guy who’s throwing the Metal horns in at least 80 percent of the pictures he’s been in over the last ten years. But indulge me in one more observation about photography in China.

It’s less common now, but married Chinese couples once invariably had outsize hunsha zhao – wedding gown photos – hanging in their living rooms, the bride usually so caked in makeup as to be unrecognizable. Literally unrecognizable. The other day I heard about a Beijing couple who, after ten years of being told by visiting friends that the people in the gigantic wedding photo they had above their living room sofa looked nothing like them, finally checked with the studio where it had been taken. Sure enough, there had been a mix-up. They’d had someone else’s mawkish, soft-focus monstrosity on their wall all those years.

Seriously, though, I’ve often recommended writing – even if it’s just posts to your Twitter or Facebook account or e-mails home to Mom – as a great way to crystallize your experience living in Beijing in this remarkable time. I’m discovering that photography is the same thing. At least on its occasional smog-free days, Beijing is actually a decently photogenic city, with a good mix of squalor and chic, timelessness and hypermodernity. I’m sure I’ll start posting lots of pictures once I stop completely sucking as a photographer.

Oh, and this might not be the place for it, but anyone want to buy a used bread machine?