Visualizing the Middle Kingdom: A Century of Early China (Street) Photography
Silk filature or factory, Shanghai: A filature was an establishment for reeling silk from cocoons. There were many such factories in Shanghai and they must have employed several hundred children. Silk was of course a luxury item for the wealthy and much exported. This sobering image, complete with fingerprint, brings to mind the campaigning work "How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis, one of the earliest publications of photojournalism documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s.
