Daniel Traub

Little North Road is a photographic collaboration that looks at a pedestrian bridge in the middle of Guangzhou. The bridge serves as a symbolic gateway into China from Africa. At the heart of this project is a selection of images collected from two Chinese itinerant portrait photographers, Wu Yong Fu and Zeng Xian Fang. Equipped with digital cameras, they have made a living making portraits for Africans and other groups who wanted a memento of their time in China. Daniel Traub’s photographs on the bridge and immediate vicinity explore the broader dynamics of the area and provide a context through which to see these portraits.

Daniel Traub has published two monographs with Kehrer Verlag: North Philadelphia (2014) and Little North Road (2015).

As a filmmaker, Traub has directed documentaries including the feature length Barefoot Artist about Lily Yeh and her collaborative artworks in war-torn communities; and Xu Bing: Phoenix, which highlights the condition of Chinese migrant labourers. He has been the director of photography for numerous documentaries and reports for networks and production companies including PBS, Arte and German Television ZDF where he worked extensively with senior correspondent Joachim Holtz. In 2011, Daniel Traub founded the film production company Itinerant Pictures. In 2019, he completed Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own, a feature-length documentary on the artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.

North Philadelphia is a photographic portrait of a neighborhood in prolonged crisis. The book presents a glimpse into an urban area that hovers between decay and possibility, and is emblematic of many such regions across the United States. Made between 2008-2013, North Philadelphia combines images of dilapidated homes, vacant lots, and street corners with portraits of the residents.

Traub lived in China from 1998 to 2007 where he was engaged with long-term photographic projects, including Simplified Characters, a series of street pictures that explore the vast changes at the beginning of the 21st century in Chinese cities, as well as the series Peripheries, which looks at the landscape at the outskirts of several major Chinese cities. In 2007 he moved back to the United States and began a project looking at the city where he was born, Philadelphia. He also continued to travel extensively, including returning frequently to China where he worked on the longterm project from 2009 to 2014 Little North Road.

Daniel Traub (born 1971) is a New York City-based photographer and filmmaker. Much of his work focuses on border regions and marginalized communities.