Since So Many People Dress with Care, He Photographs Them All | 100 People With Ideas
Zhang Jiayin is a street-style photographer. He doesn't shoot the odd characters you usually see in the media.
Zhang Jiayin is a street-style photographer. He doesn't shoot the odd characters you usually see in the media.
"A lot of people have told me, 'Shanghai isn't nearly as stylish as you make it look,'" Zhang says. It is one of the comments that stuck with him from years ago, when he was posting street-style photos on Tumblr and Weibo.
"Street-style photographer" is not quite the right title for Zhang Jiayin, even though that is his job. It doesn't fit because in today's Chinese media, street style is mostly tied up with playing to the crowd. To pull in more eyes, the people getting dressed, the people taking the pictures and the outlets running them all reach for the outlandish. Someone's narrow, private taste, sincere as it may be, gets misread and blown up once it reaches a mass audience.
There is far less of that shock in Zhang's blog, largely because he stays away from celebrities and runway shows and actually looks for his subjects out on the street.
All kinds of people turn up there. Whether or not you share their sense of beauty, you can feel that they hold an instinctive respect for the act of getting dressed. Respect, not display or showing off. They are treating a decent thing seriously, and it is an important part of life.
This is how Zhang works. He walks the streets, watches how passersby dress and carry themselves, and asks the ones he likes whether he can take their picture. If someone stiffens up in front of the lens and loses their natural ease, he may fall back on a small trick to loosen them: pretend the shoot is over, then call out as they walk away and catch the moment they turn back.
On a weekday he has to grab a few frames in the narrow window while people are rushing to work. So when he later listed his own strengths, "fast" made the list. Some people, of course, find being flagged down mid-stride baffling, and wave him off and keep walking. Zhang feels the loss, as if what slipped away were not a photograph but a specimen.
That comparison may overstate it. What he actually says is: "I think of it as a record — the attitudes and ways of living of Chinese people over these ten or twenty years, put on display. I find that really interesting, almost like a digital archive."
Zhang Jiayin was born in 1984, a science-and-engineering type who studied automation and took up visual art and photography on the side. He joined the street-style site P1, then quit over a difference in values and started a blog called ShanghaiExpress, which he mirrored to Weibo. Instagram had not taken off yet.
Many people who see ShanghaiExpress think at once of Scott Schuman, whose street-style blog The Sartorialist, started in 2005, may be one of the most valuable blogs going today. Scott has published three books, was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in fashion and design, and has work in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Put simply, if you like street-style pictures that are good-looking and unaffected, the odds are you have run into his.
Zhang Jiayin and Scott Schuman are much alike: neither came up as a professional photographer, both are drawn to the social side of fashion rather than only its glamour (a "sartorialist" is someone interested in, or working in, the tailoring of clothes), and both turned street photography into a job.
The likeness comes through strongly when you page through the two blogs (though that may be because they both used the same Blogger template). You can go straight to the homepage for the newest pictures, or click any photo that catches you in the three-by-three grid of Random Posts. With no warning you drop into one place at one time, and look — more clearly, in more detail — at the subject that caught your interest. However many you look at, the same sensibility and eye run through all of them.
His subjects dress in wildly different ways and differ just as much in manner and style, yet everyone in the pictures looks at ease, and a few even look slightly puzzled or caught off guard. That is nothing like the fashion bloggers and scene insiders you picture moving easily in front of a camera. The people Zhang Jiayin or Scott Schuman photograph are only themselves, and their clothes make you more curious about who they are, instead of stealing the show.
Some people use these photos as dressing references and find more pleasure in putting outfits together. Others treat them as a window onto the city. For Zhang Jiayin, it is a record.
"I'm not photographing what bag someone is carrying or what skirt someone is wearing, and I'm not photographing 'certain people' either" — Scott Schuman said much the same thing when we interviewed him earlier — "what I'm after is a particular kind of bearing."
Because this is the sort of thing you can only sense, never spell out, their blogs are almost nothing but photographs, with words used only to mark when and where each one was taken. As it happens, in the early days — Scott's around 2007 to 2009, Zhang's around 2012 — both wrote down a few impressions, commenting on an outfit that had moved them. But Zhang soon felt awkward about it. Writing that sort of thing struck him as affected, and looking back, it added little.
Scott Schuman has been to Shanghai too, and, interestingly, his pictures there picked up, without meaning to, the Chinese elements a foreigner's eye finds. Zhang had a similar feeling in Tokyo but dodged it on purpose: over a week there with his girlfriend, he posted only two photographs. "Because once you get to Tokyo you see that people dress at a much higher level. It's already that high, so I wanted to find something more unusual."
Once he had shot enough, brands and magazines began asking Zhang to do "street style" for them. JNBY, Zuczug and Mo & Co have all set up collaborations. They supply the season's new clothes and bring in brand VIPs, or people with social influence who are not professional models, as the subjects. The setting is someone's home, or a road — rarely a studio.
All of it is meant to reproduce the feeling of ShanghaiExpress: an unaffected, natural beauty. Which is an interesting thing. At a moment when street style is everywhere, Zhang Jiayin can define a style of his own, and that style is worth real money. Sometimes a magazine sends Zhang and other photographers to shoot the same celebrity, and he is left very little time, so he grabs a few frames out on the road. As noted at the start, his edge is that trained-up speed.
But precisely because the style cannot be pinned down, it can only ever be a one-man business. Street-style photography done at volume still revolves around runway shows and fashion people. Tommy Ton, the photographer who came out of style.com, is the best-known example, and the style he shoots can belong only to a few.
Zhang Jiayin puts it more bluntly: he doesn't want to photograph logos, designer labels, clothes that look expensive and impressive. Those belong to one short stretch of time, and leave nothing behind.
Most of the people he has photographed left no contact details. A few he has run into more than once without ever learning their names. As the scene gradually came together, he found out who some of them were.
There was one rare exception. Last year on Wukang Road in Shanghai, Zhang photographed an old woman in a floral dress from Uniqlo's collaboration with the French model Inès, smiling in a way he found lovely. Afterwards she asked to see the picture and gave Zhang her daughter's email address. Later, while shooting for JNBY, Zhang thought of her again — and made her a JNBY model.
Images from ShanghaiExpress, The Sartorialist
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.