Shanghai Waterfront
Shanghai, China
2015
I couldn’t find any tires on the waterfront to photograph here in Shanghai like I did with the first shot I posted from our Scotland trip last month, so I decided on something more indicative of China than that tire shot was of Scotland. This is the newer downtown district of Shanghai, taken across the Yangtze River. Nothing special about this shot, I was standing on a promenade with a few thousand other folks, mostly Chinese, who had their cameras pointed in the same direction.
While the Chinese were quite enamored with the scene across the river, many of them were also quite enamored with us fifteen or so American artists. (The fact that we were artists was unknown to them.) We had to pose for a number of photos with various groups of them. We wondered if they took the photos so they could go home and show off their new American “buddies” to all their friends.
But that interpretation of their motivation is probably too egocentric. More likely they were taking those photos for the same reason they take selfies with a buffalo or elk in the background when they tour Yellowstone National Park–just another unusual sighting on their vacation. I can just hear them telling their friends “Look, here’s me posing with some of those goofball American tourists in Shanghai. I like it almost as much as the one of me and the World’s largest ball of twine.”