In April of this year the New York Times assigned me to explore in a series of 20 photographs the new Chinese leadership’s dramatic, history-making plan to turn 250 million farmers into city dwellers in the coming 12 years.
There’s a popular tendency to ask a professional photographer about equipment. While it is much more challenging to find out the image-maker’s motivation, cultural perspective, conceptual framework and philosophical cultivation, the camera does matter. As a photojournalist, I need to be on top of fast-changing and varied situations on assignment, from battling Arctic snow and getting soaked in sea spray on geographic expeditions to running with a rioting crowd to capturing exquisite nightlife photos under extreme low-light conditions. There’s no escaping, only a high-end digital SLR would do. I chose Canon over Nikon, simply because it is more widely available, …
Backstage of the Martell advertising campaign: http://www.justinjin.com/backstage/the-making-of-martells-2013-china-campaign/
China is embarking on a vast program of urbanisation: http://www.justinjin.com/work/publications/china-embarking-on-vast-program-of-urbanization/
Shielded from rapid Chinese development by a cascade of steep mountains, the lush village of Dimen has kept centuries-old Dong minority traditions alive. But as highways and tunnels encroach, the future of the village is at a crossroads. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/village/
Little besides dots of nomadic tribes and spectres of Soviet concentration camps haunt the icy desert of the Russian Arctic. But deep beneath the permafrost lie untold treasures: a cache of oil and gas so big it could sustain a fiscally-troubled Russia for decades. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/arctic/
Mesmerized by both the incredible light and the medieval darkness that surround Russia and its people, I stayed until 2011 photographing everyone from the president and billionaires to criminals and the down-and-out. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/rising/
Creating portraits is alchemy for me. While by definition they are posed, both by the photographer and the subjects, I aim to tell authentic stories about people and their relationships to their environments. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/portraits/
Even when I travel as a tourist, my eye is constantly focused on the people around me, imagining their challenges, their aspirations, and how they connect to the landscape that surrounds them. this photographie was shot during a travel reportage for Geo Magazine. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/travels/
Workers scrub jeans using a paint-stripper machine in Mr Huang’s factory. http://www.justinjin.com/work/reportage/midnight-blue/