Philipp Scholz Rittermann

Philipp Scholz Rittermann 

Emperor's River

April 4 - 28, 2013

Philipp Scholz Rittermann's Emperor's River illustrates the story of China's ongoing economic expansion. Reports of run-away pollution, trade imbalances, land grabs, and corruption hardly scratch the surface of the scale and depth of the enormous changes occurring there. Such dramatic expansion is largely being fueled by the world's most voracious consumers beyond China's borders.  

For this photographic project, Rittermann traveled the length of the Grand Canal, located in the heavily populated flats of Eastern China's alluvial plain. The largest artificial river in the world, the Canal stretches over a thousand miles from Beijing to Hangzhou, connecting cities large and small, and traversing both the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers.

"Contradictions and disparities abound in China. What I found as I traveled was a breathtaking, fast-paced collision of antiquity and modernity; the newly rich vs. the long suffering poor, and the strangest of bedfellows - unbridled capitalism and Communism. The standard single-frame photograph felt too limited for tackling such a varied subject, so I chose to work panoramically, assembling my images out of many overlapping exposures. This approach allowed me to craft expansive, temporally and visually layered images, capable of holding the complexities of the scenes I encountered."

Philipp Scholz Rittermann was born in Lima, Peru in 1955, and began photographing at age 12. Escaping a military coup in 1969, his family moved to Europe where Rittermann spent the next thirteen years living in Germany and Spain. He emigrated to the US in the 1980s and currently lives in Southern California. His work has been published in numerous books and magazines, and is included in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France. In conjunction with a mid-career survey in 2001, the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego published a monograph of Ritterman's work, Navigating by Light. In 2011, Emperor's Riverwas exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.