Stuart Franklin, Farewell Pine Tree, Huangshan Mountains, 1998 The photographs here are part of a study that investigates the bewildering junction of nature and society as it exists in China today. These images reveal the contradictory relationship that prevails: at the same time that we love nature we destroy it. As the ecologist Liang Cong Jie has commented, people are trying to remember what we have had in the past, but it is already lost. Historically, only the rich could afford the leisure to enjoy nature. For the rest, survival has depended on its transformation. In the Huang Shan mountains near Shanghai, we find nature as if it had been codified and formalized. Here are the pine trees, rocks, and clouds of China's collective memory, remaining as altar and oracle amid the last scraps of wilderness. This landscape has offered solace at times of upheaval and reform since the Song Dynasty (a.d. 960-1297), when its representation in the art of scroll painting matured. Today, the region serves as a stage set for four million visitors who arrive with their cameras each year to carry the iconic wilderness home: eternally captured, personalized, and further miniaturized. To the north in Beijing (which like most cities in China is rapidly losing its old residential neighborhoods to multi-story apartment blocks), communities of single-story dwellings with courtyard gardens that once characterized the physical and social heart of this ancient city have been almost completely demolished. Along with the houses, places for rest and contemplation have all but disappeared. To compensate for their lost gardens, many people create tiny indoor landscapes with bonsai trees and suiseki, stones prized for their resemblance to mountains depicted in traditional paintings. Nature, or idealized miniature versions of what is left of it, is found and captured in the weekend street markets. In Beijing's Ritan Park, Buddhist priests and ballet dancers seeking peace amid urban chaos meditate or dance under pagoda trees that were planted long ago. In the western hills above the city, ancient ginkgoes and cypresses are venerated by city-dwellers who make frequent visits to public gardens that remain untouched by urbanization. -Stuart Franklin STUART FRANKLIN took up the camera at the age of seventeen, studied photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design, and began working as a photojournalist in 1980. Franklin traveled extensively as a freelance photographer for the Sygma agency and joined Magnum Photos in 1985. He has been honored with the Christian Aid Award for Humanitarian Photography (1981) and the Tom Hopkinson Prize for Photojournalism (1989). Franklin's book, The Time of Trees, will be published by Leonardo Arte in the year 2000.