Since the mid-1980s, I have visited China on a regular basis; what I have witnessed over the years is epic. The country has modernized at an unparalleled pace and yet the enigma of China is that some things seem barely to change at all. Its five-thousand-year history continues to emanate from the landscape in spite of recently built freeways, office towers, and apartment blocks. The collision between ancient and modern has been particularly magnified in Suzhou. With its network of canals that dates from the eighth century b.c., this city has often been compared to Venice, though many of the brick homes and arched bridges that give Suzhou its appeal were probably already built when Marco Polo arrived during the thirteenth century and "discovered" silk. The Grand Canal and the waterways compose one of the great industrial transportation complexes in Western China and are the lifeblood of commerce for cities along the way. The canal is choked with the traffic of boats and barges moving goods everywhere. It throbs with the sputtering sound of two-stroke gasoline engines, and on still, cold days the pollution hangs in the air with a pallor that makes the winter even more gray. I have taken great pleasure in wandering these streets, following them to their end just to see where they go, and taking photographs along the way. As the years pass, these images will remind me that some of my travels were measured in distance, and others were measured in time. -Robert Glenn Ketchum. ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, a renowned nature photographer and environmental activist, is Curator of Photography for the National Park Foundation and on the Board of Councilors of the American Land Conservancy. He has received the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award as well as the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography. Ketchum's Aperture publications include The Legacy of Wildness (1993), The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rainforest (1994), and Northwest Passage (1996).

Robert Glenn Ketchum, Grand Canal, Suzhou, 1986-1995