Shooting the Tiger began as a return, and became a portrait of a season turning. Xiaoxiao Xu, working between China and the Netherlands, photographed the traditional Shèhuo festival across villages in China’s Northwest, where farmers mark the end of winter with theatrical performances, songs, acrobatics, processions of costumed gods and warriors, drums, and fireworks meant to drive off demons. Xu’s camera does not stand apart from these rites. She moves from village to village, is received into homes as communities prepare, and lets that access shape the atmosphere of the pictures: part document, part waking dream, with snow-covered roofs and painted faces blurring the line between observance and participation.
What distinguishes the book is the way it treats tradition as a living negotiation rather than a relic. The festival is described here as disappearing, or better, evolving; against a fraying connection between people and the soil, the old forms persist because they still do something for those who keep them. Xu photographs that persistence with an eye for both the solemn and the slightly strange, allowing the mysterious and even alienating qualities of the event to surface alongside its warmth. The result is a body of work that can speak to viewers whose traditions these are not, without pretending the distance away.
Maria-Caterina Bellinetti contributes an essay, and Rob van Hoesel is responsible for the design of the volume. The Eriskay Connection published the first edition in 2022: 96 pages, English-language, classic softcover, 229 × 331 mm. The vertical proportions and the sequence give the photographs room to breathe, and the design is credited as a distinct contribution rather than a neutral container.
For a collector drawn to contemporary documentary practice, this is a considered object: a single photographer’s sustained engagement with a specific, seasonal cultural form, made with an essay and an intentional design, and printed and bound in the Netherlands. Its subject — an agricultural festival in transition — is not one that photography returns to often with this kind of patient, insider access.
