The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is home to China’s largest African migrant population, predominantly from Nigeria. In the city’s Little North Road neighborhood there is a small pedestrian bridge where immigrants from all over the world go to relax, hang out and have their picture taken by local Chinese photographers.
Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Traub was so intrigued by these images that he made an arrangement with the photographers to collect the images of thousands of African migrants for a multimedia art project. Although Traub’s vast image archive from the Little North Road offers tremendous artistic potential, it also raises serious ethical questions over whether it is moral to publish these images when the individuals did not provide informed consent. Traub joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the art and the ethics of his Little North Road project.
Daniel Traub is a Brooklyn-based photographer and filmmaker. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago and the Print Center in Philadelphia, and are in public and private collections, including the Margulies Collection at the WAREhOUSE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine and Aperture. More of his work can seen at danieltraub.net and itinerantpictures.com.
