Photos :: Totems by Alain Delorme

“These towering loads – or “totems”, as Delorme calls them – are symbols of both a bustling boomtown and a reminder that the country’s economic leaps forward have depended on the hard graft of an army of workers. At first glance, these workers are the Herculean heroes of this brave new world, able to balance and heave huge loads. But linger longer and Delorme’s images take on a different dimension. “After a while I had the feeling that the objects they carried swallowed them,” he reveals. These pictures aren’t an ode to consumerism, then, but a reflection of our slavish clamoring for endless piles of goods. Look closer still, and the loads seem to teeter at crazy angles, defying gravity. The piles have, in fact, been digitally exaggerated to question their role in the world’s fastest-growing economy. “I wanted to show how small, traditional jobs in Shanghai life may soon disappear,” explains Delorme – replaced, that is, by gleaming transport trucks bought by a city in hot pursuit of modernity.”

Text :: Adam Jacques :: Shanghai’s Totems of Consumerism :: The Independent :: April 2011