The first photograph from Chagan Lake is not of fish or horses. It is the sun, low and white in a haze, over slabs of ice that have broken, tilted and frozen again at angles. There is nobody in it, and it is the quietest frame in a set of more than a hundred and twenty.
We were on the ice by about half past eight in the morning, at minus twenty-five degrees. You walk out slowly. It is slippery and it is very cold, and we had spikes strapped over our boots for grip. Not for the faint hearted.
Where this is
Chagan Lake is in Qian Gorlos Mongol Autonomous County, outside Songyuan in Jilin Province, in the north-east of China. From the middle of December to late January the fishermen cut holes through the ice, feed a net underneath, and draw it out again. The custom is old — it is described as flourishing under the Liao and Jin dynasties, which is roughly a thousand years ago.
What that description leaves out is how much of the work is still done by horses.
The horses
They work in pairs. Each pair is harnessed to a long wooden beam, and they walk it round, and round, and the beam turns the winch that brings the net in under the ice. A handler walks with them. Nobody hurries.
The frame I would print from the whole trip is two chestnut horses leaning into that beam, heads down, snow kicked up around their hooves. It is not a dramatic photograph. It is a photograph of effort, and horses show effort more honestly than people do.
There is another in black and white: a pair pulling a loaded cart, a man standing on top of the load, a second man walking beside it. There is no grand reason for the black and white. I wanted the horses to stand out.
Who the fish are for
I saw the first net of the season come up. It takes hours. The net is about two thousand metres long and ten metres deep, and the last stretch is the slowest, because that is the end where the fish are.
When the net comes up, the catch is spread across the ice and freezes where it lands. In one frame the fish fill the picture edge to edge, a single grey texture with eyes in it. There is no sky in that photograph and no horizon. It took a few seconds to decide that was the right way round.
Then there is the crowd. In a frame taken as the light went, the fish are in the foreground and behind them is a long line of people, black against a pale sky, standing and watching.
Two events on one lake
That line of people is the honest part of the story, so I am not going to crop it out. Winter fishing at Chagan Lake is a working fishery and it is also a festival, and on the ice both happen at the same time on the same surface. There were photographers in bright jackets everywhere I looked. I was one of them.
Being one of a crowd changes what you can do. You cannot wait for the scene to clear, because it will not clear. You can only decide what the picture is about and cut everything else out of the frame, or else let the crowd in and admit what you are looking at.
The horses did not seem to mind either event. They walked the beam.
Harbin, after dark
The set ends in Harbin, at the street stalls at night — a basket of dumplings breathing steam into the cold, a vendor half hidden in his own smoke, signs in red and yellow above the grills.
After the white ice and the grey fish, those frames are full of warm colour. They are also the easiest pictures of the trip: everything is lit for you, from below, by the thing being cooked.
It is cold out there. Very cold. That does not mean we cannot have an ice cream.
The full set from Harbin and Chagan Lake is on SmugMug.