Hello Everybody!

Welcome to my Flickr profile

I'm a photographer from London that used to be an architect but now lives in Beijing!

I mainly work on personal "art" projects about live and Chinese society, some of which can be found here or on my main website Nathaniel McMahon Photography

In 2006 I moved to Beijing China. China was to be an adventure and experience, something I felt I had missed after 7 years of study and practice as an architect in my hometown London. China was a chance to experience a culture vastly different to mine, a culture that had change and possibility in its future. It would also be a place where I could begin again and have the courage to call myself an artist.

The process of learning photography had taught me most of what I know about Beijing and China. Look, shoot, develop, interpret, re-focus ideas, re-apply/repeat process. The process of capturing an image and of understanding a place and time are the same. My operation of the camera helps me think. It’s an unforgiving process that does not accept rash judgments or simple explanations, all it leaves me with are images, and if I can’t understand my thoughts with these images they fail as images.

The place I live is a place of limbo that exists between the sprawling metropolis of new China and the rural stock of a crumbling old China. It’s the first stop for many dreamers seeking the glory and potential of the capital, but also the desperate seeking employment far from home. Here is where the real battleground in China is unearthing itself, the growing pains of a culture that's long been suppressed; exploding into a new China undergoing a puberty of confusion, rebelliousness, self doubt and ego development.

I am seeking to photograph and identify the visual fragments that are influencing a new Chinese mentality. This is what I’m about as a photographer, the use of a camera to probe and investigate the landscape, and the use of those images as testaments to a society and culture. I believe it is critical to society that we analyze the visual landscapes we create as reflections upon who we are.

Middle Kingdom