The Quiet Divide

These photographs record a city stripped of spectacle.
No drama, no heroism, no curated narratives. Just people surviving in uneven, imperfect fragments of life.

An elderly man hides his face behind a sun-bleached quilt.
A tea cup sits beside him. His portable toilet is only an arm’s length away. Reality has cornered him, yet he still protects a minimal sense of order.

A sick dog, wearing an oversized cone, stumbles through the same narrow alley, absorbing the world’s roughness without complaint.

Meanwhile, a girl in bright pink rollerblades strokes a stray cat with the careless ease of someone untouched by exhaustion. Her body language is all light and air as if she has accidentally slipped in from a parallel universe where the world did not fracture.

This is the truth of the hutongs:
no symmetry, no fairness, no shared rhythm.
Some people live under permanent shadow.
Some glide briefly through the same street in unearned light.
Yet all inhale the same dust, pass under the same drying quilts, move within the same confined geometry of fate.

The pandemic wrapped each life in its own thin layer of plastic, opaque for some, strangely luminous for others.

What these images reveal is not “the lower class,” but the distance between lives that stand only meters apart.
Not poverty, but the blunt authenticity of existence when hope leaks in only by accident.