Gather round the fire, I’m going to tell you a photography book ghost story.

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Once upon a time, a young American photographer named Rian Dundon moved to China. It was a more optimistic and open time than today, when China seemed to be becoming more like America with each passing year, with more money, more freedom, more everything. Rian didn’t have a lot of money himself, so he didn’t live the fancy expatriate lifestyle in Beijing or Shanghai; he taught English in Changsha, a large city in the interior. He stayed for six years and made an extraordinary body of work documenting ordinary life that was published in the book CHANGSHA in 2012.

The book’s European publisher had launched a crowd-funding campaign to pay for printing it, and it was a resounding success. Around 200 people got the first copies of the book this way. But even as those books were in the mail, the publisher went bankrupt for reasons beyond Rian’s control. A few more books were sold at fairs and festivals and here and there. The critical response was fabulous in The New York Times, TIME, Mother Jones, The International Herald Tribune, and many other publications. But the vast majority of the books never reached the open market, and …. well … not disappeared, exactly …. but …

… by this time Rian was living first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then later, Portland, Oregon. He went to graduate school, and started a family. After many emails and conversations that went nowhere (without funding) about getting the books to the US or other arrangements, Rian had given up all hope. It had been years since he’d had any contact, and he didn’t know what had happened to them. Had they been destroyed? Shredded? Lost? Abandoned? He really didn’t know any more and the whole episode made him sad. Where were the books? The few copies that were in circulation had to be held together with tape, passed from hand to hand quietly with voices in hushed tones, with rumors of astronomical sums changing hands. Had they ever even really existed?!?

I first met Rian at the International Bar on First Avenue in New York City long, long ago. I’d seen the photographs on my metal magnet-board wall when he was workshopping the sequence. I’d traveled with and made photographs alongside him in North China, where his fluent Mandarin made him the translator for me, a native Cantonese speaker! I’d been one of the lucky crowd-funders who received a precious book. And I’d heard bits and pieces of this story over the years, to the point where Rian didn’t want to talk about it any more.

With the passage of time, the work has become a document of what turned out to be a brief moment when it felt like greater transparency and liberalism would accompany greater wealth and power. Alas, that turned out not to be the case as repression, censorship, and surveillance have returned in ever increasing force to contemporary China. So Rian’s photographs are more bittersweet now than when they were made 10-15 years ago, and it was even more poignant that the book, like many of the situations of transgressive freedom depicted in its pages, had become a ghost — fleeting, haunting — gone.

But slowly a thought began forming in my mind. What if … we could help Rian find and rescue those books? I had visions of wading through sewers with flashlights in hand, of knocking on doors in the dead of night with search warrants, of dabbling with the occult, forensic science, and untangling confusing clues and false leads. But in the end…

…we found the books still sealed on their original shipping pallet, deep in a basement in the rural south of France! They hadn’t been disturbed in a decade! No rubber truncheons, fingerprinting, or DNA analysis had been needed. Just some bureaucratic global Covid pandemic era wrangling with shipping companies and their delays. (And, off the record, profuse burning of incense and incantations uttered under the full moon…)

So, at last, we are proud to be offering Rian Dundon’s original CHANGSHA, no longer a long-lost cult classic, but for the FIRST TIME in general distribution! See more images from the book below. –Alan Chin

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Hardcover Book
8.5″ x 11″, 205 pages perfect bound
Offset printed in Italy
ISBN # 978-1-909076-03-7
Photographs and text by Rian Dundon
Foreword by Gail Hershatter
Essay by YZ

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