Planet Shanghai: Photographs by Justin Guariglia - Tapa dura

In a series of photo essays, Guariglia provides extensive evidence of Shanghai's attempts to graft the exotic and new onto the indigenous and traditional. The results are fascinating, often perplexing. In a chapter called "style," we get glimpses of two mismatched knee socks cut off at the instep (Prada's inspiration last season?), worn with thong sandals, of full-face plastic visors that look like lampshades, of punk-colored hair and black fishnets all juxtaposed with the pajamas that the locals seem to have adopted as civilian uniform. (Until this book, I though that only writers lived in their pajamas.)The pile of bicycle tires and a wooden folding chair in the section called "Still Life" would have appealed to Recycler Wang. A lace tablecloth is draped over a motorcycle. In "Daily Life," a scene of checkout lines at a store imparts a mind-boggling sense of scale a sea of heads and a maze of shopping carts so vast that it makes Costco look like a boutique operation.In his foreword, John Krich calls Guariglia's photographs "an act of visual preservation, a catalog of close kinship-like living, with no sordid detail or curious impulse spared, at once touchingly intimate and strangely open, bred by conditions soon to be reduced to rubble." Indeed, there is something precarious about the moment these images describe. "Over the course of my travels," Guariglia observes, "I began to realize that authentic slices of culture that have withstood change over centuries, and may still provide a portal inot ancient traditions, are truly becoming a global anomaly. They still exist in some areas, but they are unfortunately dwindling rapidly, amid the worldwide assimilation of cultures and societies." The New York Times Style Magazine

Shanghai - the legendary Pearl of the East, architectural powerhouse, and home to the World Expo 2010 - continues to fascinate people from around the globe. Photographer Justin Guariglia, who has published his work in "National Geographic and Smithsonian" magazine, frequently trains his lens on the old town and waterfront which have retained their cultural character amid megabooming development. Shanghai's open-air lifestyle, bustling markets, and curious fashion sense are all seen here, granting us a multifaceted and intimate portrait of day-to-day life in one of the great cities of the world. And with the forthcoming Olympic games drawing ever more attention to China, there has never been a better time to discover the astonishing city that is Shanghai.