Polly Braden’s China Between takes as its subject the new urban culture that emerged in the People’s Republic after the Special Economic Zones of the 1980s opened the country to global trade and international capital. The stated goal was financial, but the money carried new values and new ways of life with it, and Braden’s photographs attend to those effects as they settle into ordinary experience. Working over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, she looks at a society shifting from predominantly agrarian to urban, and at the people forming what the publisher calls the country’s new urban class.

The approach is deliberately close and quotidian rather than panoramic. Braden’s interest lies in the material and psychological weight of change, registered in a casual glance, a moment of doubt, a quick trip to the shopping mall. The book proposes that such glimpses describe contemporary China as fully as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce. Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze, characterises the work in her accompanying text as at once anthropological document and personal travelogue, a series of intimate portraits and, more broadly, a study of a country in transition; David Campany, Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, contributes a second essay.

Braden is not a visitor passing through. By the time of publication, she had lived in China and photographed it over a decade, and the book belongs to a wider body of extended photo-essays she has made in the UK, the Middle East, Morocco and Kenya. Her pictures have appeared in The Guardian, The Saturday Telegraph magazine, Ei8ht, Portfolio, ICON, Photoworks, Frieze, The Sydney Morning Herald and D Magazine (Italy). She received the Jerwood Photography Prize in 2003 and was named The Guardian’s Young Photographer of the Year in 2002, with exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

The book was published in 2010: a hardback of 96 pages with 63 colour photographs, measuring 297mm x 245mm. For readers of documentary photography about China, its value lies in its sustained refusal of the epic image and in its timing, published while the transformation it records was still underway.