The Unscripted Detour

The Unscripted Detour is a black-and-white documentary photography series set in Chengkan, a traditional tourist town in Anhui, China. It examines observation, cultural shifts and unexpected encounters amid the town’s rigidly arranged tourist landscape. I initially aimed to photograph local art students sketching and idealizing the time-honored Hui-style scenery. Yet the project took an unexpected turn when a Black family toured the ancient village on their own with no guide. This unplanned moment changed my role from a passive recorder of artists to a wanderer documenting an unscripted cross-cultural meeting. My candid shots capture subtle tensions and surreal contrasts in modern rural China. They juxtapose timeless traditional charms — old lanes, couplet-adorned walls and folk puppets — against traces of modern globalization, like an office chair left amid nature. Removing typical travel photography colors, the work highlights shapes, textures and people’s inner states. It also rethinks the so-called "tourist gaze": while art students chase a romanticized version of the past, the foreign family experiences the present directly. This project proves that unplanned incidents expose a place’s rich, multi-layered truths far more effectively than any arranged travel route.