Interview • 081 PH

Daniel Traub, Chinese Takeout

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

My name is Daniel Traub. I am a photographer and filmmaker currently based in Philadelphia.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

I became interested in photography when I was about twelve. There are quite a few artists in my family so the visual arts were part of the atmosphere I grew up in.

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

I have an intuitive sense when a photograph might work—when certain elements and conditions coalesce.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

In general, I don’t set out with the intention of telling a story, at least not one that is pre-planned. There is a slow, cumulative process of searching, digging, and following those particular images that resonate as markers for the path forward.

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

I would love to see Sanaa in Yemen and the medieval, multi-story tower houses made of fired mud-brick. 

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

I grew up in center city Philadelphia so I have a deep connection to the urban environment. In photographing in cities, I am particularly interested in what the encounters and convergences inherent to everyday city life can reveal. I have also gravitated to the peripheries of and interstices within cities—border regions and in-between spaces.

Regarding your project Chinese Takeout: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

Chinese Takeout grew out of another project called North Philadelphia—a series about a primarily African American section of the city. I became intrigued by the Chinese takeout restaurants that dotted the landscape. While commonplace, they revealed a complex narrative between the African American and Chinese communities. Locals seemed to resent the Chinese as outsiders who barricaded themselves behind thick sheets of bulletproof plastic. The Chinese—mostly migrants from small provincial towns in southern China—appeared like stranded interlopers in a remote foreign outpost. 

What is that «one thing» you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

When I lived in Shanghai from 2005-2007, I spent a great deal of time exploring the outskirts of the city. I came upon one particular place where a community of migrants had set up a vast marketplace where they traded in salvaged doors and window frames collected from buildings torn down in the city center. Framing this space were abandoned, concrete skeletons of half-completed luxury villas. Within these structures, the migrants had built a kind of shantytown in which they lived. I spent a day there photographing and sensed that it could be a larger project. I went back a couple weeks later but found, to my shock, that the whole place had been razed to the ground, likely to make way for some new building development.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

I would tell my younger self to be bolder—to trust your instincts. I tell my current self the same thing! I would tell my older self: I did my best.

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

Architect.

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

Recently, I started working on the Chinese Takeout series again as, with the recent anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, it seems relevant to our moment. Additionally, the interior spaces, with their plexiglass barriers, were already, in a sense, set up for social-distancing.

Thank you, Daniel!

Editorial Notes:

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Photography: Daniel Traub (2021)
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Links: Website, Instagram, Itinerant Pictures

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