Profile: Photographer Peng Ke

I wrote about Peng Ke, a photographer whose work captures life in China:

“I kept thinking about how for a girl to be born in China [during the one child policy], she has already survived a very difficult journey—not being abandoned or aborted,” Peng says.

In considering how to translate these thoughts, conversations, and experiences into her work, Peng began to frame the start of life as a success in itself: “being born as having survived.” She enters discussions on feminism, whether it’s with her American or Chinese peers, from this lens—that of a female newborn. Someone who started surviving before she started living.

Now, facing a demographic crisis, China’s government has completely reversed course; couples are now not only allowed, but encouraged to have three children, even as the cost of raising a single child continues to go up. Peng is also thinking about feminism’s role in cultivating enhanced individual agency for women amid the consistently inconsistent socioeconomic conditions of contemporary China.

Read the whole article here.