TIME Asian Journey 2002 Photoessay: South East Asia

Patrick Zachmann

Born in Choisy-le-Roi, near Paris, Zachmann became a freelance photographer in 1976 and soon became dedicated to long-term projects often involving books, exhibits and collaborations with writers. Fascinated with film-like sequencing and the diary form, he has also brought to his work an awareness of pictorial rhetorics such as the expressionist style of 1930s Shanghai movies and the opulent manner of the 1980s magazine success stories.

After producing a reportage on the Naples Mafia, he worked from 1982-84 in collaboration with the French Ministry of Culture on a project on highway landscapes, while also shooting a personal reportage on the difficulties of integration for young French Arabs in Marseille. From 1979 to 1986 he focused on a personal inquest in black and white on his Jewish identity.

Still fascinated by the themes of immigration, cultural fragmentation and the diaspora, he embarked on another long-term project (1986-95) on the Chinese diaspora for which he received a Prix Médicis Hors les Murs from the French Ministry of foreign affairs. In 1989, his story on Tiananmen Square was widely published in the international press. Zachmann was also a winner of the prestigious French Prix Niepce (1989) and the Art Director Merit Award for his work on prostitution and AIDS in Bangkok. He joined the Magnum Photos cooperative as a nominee in 1985 and became a full member in 1990.

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Photographs by
PATRICK ZACHMANN