When Chad Ingraham completed his photography studies in 2004 he wasn’t entirely certain what he wanted to do. A Canadian from New Brunswick, he knew he wanted to see the world and he knew too that waiting for a photography client to turn up and give him an expense account to cover his air fares would mean waiting in North America for a very long time.
“It was either working on a cruise, or teaching English,” he recalled. “Teaching English allowed me to travel on someone else’s dime.”
He signed on as an English teacher for a year in Handan, a small city in China’s Hebei province, and after traveling enough in the first year to see that China had plenty to offer, he agreed to teach for a second year.
In 2006, he moved to Shanghai, together with Beijing the only city in China set up for photographers, where he continued to teach English. It was at this time though, that he also began to make a shift into professional photography, and to it in a way that many enthusiasts ignore. He’d attend local events then offer the images to local magazines. As those publications got to know him, they’d sometimes commission him to shoot other events. Those jobs in turn led to occasional commercial gigs and to the sort of portrait work that he enjoyed the most. With a friend, he also set up a family photography studio.
With the photography commissions building up, Chad cut back on his teaching hours until, four-and-a-half years after arriving in China as an English teacher, he felt able to make the shift into full-time photography.
Photograph courtesy: Chad Ingraham
Since then Chad’s images have been printed in Forbes, in The Wall Street Journal and in Fast Company among other publications. When we caught up with him in a Starbucks in Shanghai’s Jingan district, he had just returned from a trip to photograph tribal women in Yunnan, and was in the process of setting up a studio in a nearby skyscraper with a couple of partners in his new photography company.
Photographers Are Like Baristas
Finding clients and building his photography business from those early small commissions was, he says, relatively smooth. He used Agency Access mailings, and his website has also brought in some work from editors keen to find a good portrait photographer in Shanghai who could produce images to run alongside business stories. Mostly, he says, clients reach out to him.
“If you focus your portfolio, you can find great work — or great work finds you.”
The bulk of the clients who find him are foreign, either Western and English-language publications or foreign brands that need local images. Foreign editors in China tend to prefer working with foreign photographers with whom they can communicate easily and whom they can trust, says Chad. The quality of the work, too, is more reliable. While China does have a small number of high profile photographers, much of the photographic work produced and printed in the country is, Chad remarks, “standard stuff.”
That might not be entirely the photographers’ fault. One reason that Chad prefers to work with foreign clients, filtering potential local buyers through a producer, is that local businesses tend to regard photographers as service providers rather than creative workers who bring talent as well as skill to a job.
“They see photographers like they see the baristas who work in a cafe,” Chad complained. “They make coffee; I make pictures.”
The pay, though, is reasonable. Although Chad hasn’t worked as a photographer in Canada, he says that the rates are comparable to what he would have earned had he stayed at home and built his photography business in New Brunswick. Visas, though, are a problem but there are ways to work around it.
“Everyone does the Hong Kong run and knows someone who has a company,” he says.
Finding a good assistant, though, can be difficult and the language is also a barrier. Despite being in the country for a decade, Chad feels that he is still just scratching the surface of Chinese, and is considering going back to university to really get to grip with the language.
Photography: Chad Ingraham
China Has Plenty Of Inspiration For Personal Work
But while working as a photographer in Shanghai has challenges, it also has plenty of opportunities. A rapidly growing city of over 20 million has plenty of work for photographers who can deliver the goods. The market is strong, demand is high and the community of foreign photographers is relatively small. All of the people who turn up on the first page of Google’s search results for “Shanghai photographer” know each other and will help each other with equipment and advice even as they compete for clients.
And China also has plenty of subjects for inspiration for the kinds of images that most excite photographers. Chad’s personal portfolio covers a broad range of topics from the effects of pollution, a big subject in China’s smog-filled cities, the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, a collection of images of women at home, and a series of portraits of Shanghai chefs. Despite a clear theme of bold portraits that runs through Chad’s work and which is strong enough to win him commissions from editors, he says that he’s still looking for a spark to ignite his personal work and to give him the vision that will take his photography career to the next level.
“China’s a good place for that,” he says.
Making the move from photography school graduate to working photographer isn’t always smooth or easy. Most new photographers pay their dues by spending time assisting at established studios before becoming second photographers and setting up their own shop. Few make the effort to fly halfway around the world and hustle for small jobs while working as an English teacher. But if you pick the right spot, shoot the right pictures, make the right connections and land enough commissions to go part-time before turning professional, it’s an option that can work. And you’ll also get to travel on someone else’s dime.
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