In 2015, Xiaoxiao Xu drove across China for several months, staying in eight villages across three provinces to meet eight farmers who build aircraft. They work without hangars or proper equipment, improvising in backyards with recycled scrap metal and household tools. Most are self-taught, self-employed, and short of money; some have labored for decades without ever leaving the ground. Xu photographs these men and their machines, interviews them, and gathers the drawings and technical documents they have produced along the way. Published by Eriskay Connection in 2016, the book holds photographs, text, and archival material in one sequence. Xu shares authorship with Gover Meit; Rosie Heinrich edited and translated the text, and Rob van Hoesel and Carel Fransen designed the volume. Its premise is not mockery but curiosity about why these men persist, and what their persistence produces.
What distinguishes the work is its refusal to settle for either romance or ridicule. Xu treats the aeronauts’ ambition as a form of inquiry. For them, flight is less a destination than a way of testing limits; the publisher calls their pursuit real-life science-fiction. The photographs move between the builders and the landscapes and households that frame their efforts, while the collected drawings and documents give the obsession a material record. The result is an intimate portrait of resourcefulness, flexibility, and play, and a rare look at a subculture that has rarely been documented in detail.
At 160 pages, in a 21 by 29.8 cm softcover designed by Van Hoesel and Fransen, the book is modest in format but expansive in scope. Text, image, and historical material are meant to reinforce one another rather than compete, and the sequencing carries the reader through the project’s many small narratives. The dummy received nominations at the Unseen Dummy Award in Amsterdam, the Vienna Photo Book Award, the Guatemala Photo Book award, and the Photolux Photobook Award in Italy, recognition that speaks to the strength of the concept and the care of its making.
For collectors drawn to documentary photography that operates at the edge of the plausible, this is a considered example: a sustained, long-form engagement with a subject that resists easy summary, shaped by close collaboration between photographer, writers, editors, and designers. It deserves attention for its subject alone, and for the way it holds that subject together.
