Eye Candy: Chien-Chi Chang

Chien-Chi Chang, "A newly arrived immigrant eats noodles on a fire escape, New York City," 1998. © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos.

Magnum photographer Chien-Chi Chang will exhibit new work from his China Town series at this year's Venice Biennale.

Chang is perhaps best known for this series, a seventeen-year work in progress that chronicles illegal workers living in New York City. The project began when he met a handful of men who lived in a single tenement apartment in China Town. He ate with them and slept on their floor, helped them with English language phone calls and forms and slowly began to photograph them. Years later, when Chang received the W. Eugene Smith Award, he went to visit the villages where the wives and children of these men live. The families are photographed in color, and the men in black and white. Chang says, “I have become a messenger between these divided families.”

Continue reading about the project here; and see the Biennale diptychs here.