Folk Medicine - Photo Essay - NYTimes.com

Dr. Ye Jiangsheng's home in Nanping Village, in Yixian county, is also his office, where, like nearly everyone else in the ancient town, he cultivates silkworms. A sign outside says "No. 2 Clinic" in Chinese, with "The Doctor's" written in English. The town is a warren of narrow alleys, stone and carved wood, ideal for kung fu heroes to jump from rooftop to rooftop or for tragic characters in Chinese costume dramas to wander from one darkened room to another. It's no surprise that the director Zhang Yimou is one of many to use Nanping Village as a film set.



A gray phalanx of fortresslike walls and terra- cotta roofs opens onto interior courtyards, Hui-style, as the local architecture is called. Life in Nanping Village unfolds inward, revolving around these age-old atria, like so many town squares, which locals decorate with paintings of the mountains they can't see over their windowless walls.



In Iwan Baan's photographs, Ye, the perfect country doctor, attends to his garden under his skylight, makes house calls over the cobblestones on an old bicycle, dons a lab coat to check a patient's sore throat and retires with his wife to sleep in a tiny, pitch-black bedroom, which, with its curtained platform below an enormous painted canopy, is like the insideof a lacquered puzzle box.



The peripatetic Dutch-born Baan went to capture this scene of a vanishing China for a photo festival last month. Chinese officials canceled the festival at the last minute, as they often do. But Baan was determined to show the pictures anyway.



Baan is prized as an architectural photographer and knows how architecture speaks formally. But whether documenting a vertical slum in an unfinished office tower in Caracas or Lower Manhattan blacked out by Hurricane Sandy, Baan photographs not just steel, brick and concrete. In the umbrella hung from the weathered wood screen in a patient's courtyard, as in the jumble of homely remedies on the bedside table, Baan celebrates real lives lived, architecture as humanity.



http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/02/magazine/nanping-village.html?ref=magazine

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Sunday, December 2, 2012