Photos Capture the Unknown Stories of Shanghai's Demolished Spaces

In 'Ballads of Shanghai' photographer Graham Finks captures the transitional beauty of the city's derelict building sites.

by Kevin Holmes

February 1, 2016, 2:15pm

"Big Dreams" © Graham Fink

Now complete with glimmering steel structures like its "vertical city," the 2,073' Shanghai Tower, along with a growing population of around 24 million, it's been a few decades of major change for Shanghai. Its transformation is perhaps most present in some viral images from a few years ago that show the city's Pudong financial district, Shanghai's "Manhattan," contrasting how it looked in 1990 with how it looked 20 years later.

In a symbolically representative area of the city, the paradigm of what a future-city is supposed to look like, it highlights the intense growth of the area's Supertall skyscrapers, like the distinct Oriental Pearl Tower where once there stood paddy fields.

Down on the ground, things look very different, as the city's architectural heritage is wiped clean to make way for the new. At ground-level there's rubble, demolition, crumbling concrete, the messy foundations of this gleaming futurism. In an exhibition, Ballads of Shanghai, which opens today at the Riflemaker gallery in Soho, London, photographer Graham Fink puts on display his last five years documenting these sites.

Capturing the changing pace of the city through these "‘exchange sites," where the past develops into the future, they're also an ode to the personal and the everyday, the lives and stories of the people who have made way for China's building boom. Fragments of the lives are caught amongst the sea of rubble, from the graffiti artists who use the derelict buildings for their art, to the possessions and objects left behind by former residents.

They'll soon be gone from Shanghai, but will linger on in Fink's photos. The Creators Project emailed some questions to the photographer to find out about the series, his time spent in the country, and the changes afoot there.

"You've Been Framed" © Graham Fink

The Creators Project: What first attracted you to want to document Shanghai?

Graham Fink: From the first day I arrived in Shanghai, I felt a rush of excitement. It's like the city of the future that you drew as a kid, and someone took away that drawing and actually built it. It’s the new New York.

Can you explain a little about why, specifically, you wanted to photograph the demolition sites?

I’ve always been fascinated by these kind of places. Derelict buildings, neglected spaces. There’s something deathly, with eternal stories still hanging in the ether: These sites are everywhere in China so they are still very much part of my life. I felt a real need to try and capture them.

"Girl On the Roof" © Graham Fink

What do the ‘exchange sites’ represent to you?

All over China, the past is constantly demolished to make way for the future. Super skyscrapers, office buildings and new domestic ways of living. As a result, these sites are in constant flux. Graffiti artists use the crumbling buildings as a canvas; these are regularly painted over by the government. The artists repaint them, the government paints back over them. The walls keep on tumbling down.

Is there a kind of Ballardian sadness present there, of a past being lost?

On the contrary. To me, I see incredible beauty and a fighting spirit. Like the seemingly fragile plants that are strong enough to grow back through the concrete. When I look through the lens, I don’t get a sense of past or future, just the present.

How did you go about representing the human aspect amongst the rubble and apparatus of construction?

I see wallpaper that still clings desperately to a wall. A child’s drawing on a remnant of what was formerly their bedroom. A once favorite chair, now left for nature to reclaim. These choices are clearly shown in the photographs and make these places very much alive.

"Mao Was Here" © Graham Fink

Is there a kind of aesthetic appeal to urban demolition, to perhaps the violence the landscape is being subjected to, that you wanted to capture?

I see beauty in these places. I suppose the main appeal for me is capturing what remains and giving it new meaning—the poetic narratives, lives of the unknown.

What is it that struck you most about the changes that happened in the five years you documented Shanghai? And how is that represented in the series?

China is changing rapidly. There is a desire to be the biggest and the best. The attitude is reflected in the way Chinese people drive, talk, and even walk. They are going places—fast. Perhaps at the expense of a lot of other things. Pollution being an obvious one. In the five years I’ve been here, the landscape has changed dramatically. In Changsha, for example, where Mao went to school, they recently built a 57-storey block in just 15 days. But everything has a timespan, and what goes up must come down. My series examines the space in between. After the end and before the next beginning. I used photography to show that space. And while you’re looking at those photographs, new buildings are already being constructed in that very spot.