Two Places on Earth brings together portraits Chan Chao made in Cyprus and Peru during a five-year project in the early 2000s. In Cyprus he photographed peacekeepers; in Peru he photographed women held at Santa Monica Women’s Prison. These geographically separated groups become neighbors on the page. Many of the people are far from their countries of origin, and the sequence creates encounters that could not occur between the subjects themselves.
The pictures make room for individual faces, gestures and clothing without removing the circumstances in which they were made. A uniform, a wall or a glimpse of the sea supplies context, while the sitter’s expression asks for more sustained attention. The preview spreads sometimes place a soldier opposite a woman from the prison, and sometimes isolate a portrait beside an empty page. This changing arrangement encourages comparison while allowing each person a distinct presence.
Published by Nazraeli Press in 2022, the book is an English-language hardcover of 92 pages. The first edition comprises 500 casebound copies with an original print attached to the front cover. Kim Sajet contributes the introduction, and Anthony W. Fontes is also credited as a text contributor. The cloth binding and cover photograph give a material introduction to a work concerned with the encounter between an individual and the person looking at their image.
Chao was born in Burma and moved to the United States as a child. His work has entered museum collections including the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. For readers of portrait photography, this volume offers a sustained examination of how a sequence can connect distant social settings without making them identical. Its interest lies in the tension between shared human presence and unequal circumstances, a relationship that can be reconsidered with each return to the photographs.
