I'm looking for feedback on whether the images themselves work and additionally what each communicates to you.
I really like the top image. I'm reacting to the emotional message that image communicates to me. I think it conveys an awful lot about contemporary life in China today, the extreme pace of urbanization, and could only work in black and white.
I looked at these when you first posted them, almost three months ago now, but didn't post a reply then. I suppose the fact that the first image is still resonating with me should tell you how well that image works for me.
And so what do I get out of it? The apartment blocks to the right are a fair representation how many Chinese live today, in large replicating blocks of apartment buildings. And I suspect the people who live there have reasonable jobs and reasonable incomes. Some of them will have migrated from rural villages to the big city, this is now their life.
So life in those apartments represents having "made it" in today's China, and likely represent a fairly good life. But the urban setting in the image seems to be bleak, even soulless.
China has one of the lengthiest continuous histories of any civilization in the world, and the Chinese are justly proud of that past. Today's China, however, almost seems like a culture without any history at all, perhaps in part because of the pace of change, and the degree of dislocation from rural to urban experienced by many Chinese. Shanghai in 1950 had, I believe, about 5 million residents. Today it has 20+ million. This rate of urbanization is repeated in one city after another throughout China, and the most recent estimate I've see is that 175 cities in China are at 1 million residents or greater.
So, I feel that there is a lot of cultural alienation within China, and in a small way, that this photo captures that for me.
Mark