NEW YORK, NY.- Known for her unconventional approach to portrait photography, most notably her classic trilogy The Sleepers, The Travelers, and The Narcissists, American fine art photographer Elizabeth Heyert again assumes her role as observer and voyeur in The Outsider (Damiani), her latest series, made in China in 2014-2016.

First visiting China in 2011, Heyert discovered a modern, technology driven country where everywhere she went people were shooting pictures of each other with cameras, smart phones or iPads. The rituals of Chinese amateur photographers fascinated her. They seemed to shoot incessantly, often with family members looking on and directing, and with an intimacy with their environment that bordered on stagecraft.

Few Chinese possess family photographs from the past, as so much personal property was destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Heyert suspected that the intensity of the photography she observed was partially a response to the loss of visual history experienced by so many Chinese. She decided to explore the many layers behind this idea with her camera.

With a dramatic departure from her usual practice of creating each shot in a controlled setting with an 8 x 10 view camera, Heyert roamed the teeming streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou with a hand-held camera, taking candid photographs of the Chinese as they meticulously composed portraits of each other. Unable to speak Chinese she waded through enormous crowds looking for intimate moments between people who were strangers to her, "like a silent ghost wandering around with a vintage Leica and Tri-X in a country where film is no longer even sold".

Heyert calls the project The Outsider because as a visitor to the East, and a stranger in a foreign culture searching for authenticity, she allowed herself to become a spectator to the photographer/subject relationship. Unwilling to impose her American viewpoint on people whose life experiences and traditions were so different from hers, and hoping not to make the mistakes of the 19th century photographers who posed their subjects from the East in decidedly Western tableaux, she instead captured portraits of the Chinese made by the Chinese. That became her way in, and in doing so she became a witness to the birth of a new collective visual memory.

In her artist statement, Heyert writes: "Yet, as an outsider I can't be sure that what I witnessed made me any more aware of what is true. Did the young Chinese woman in Chanel sunglasses and designer clothes pose on the wall depicting the Workers Revolution because she admired the background, or was it an ironic political statement? ... Are the crowds of Chinese with cameras preserving memories of happy moments, or inventing happy moments to memorialize in photographs? Or are they trying to obliterate memory, to wash away the horror of the harsh years by creating an optimistic, fresh, modern personal history? I don't know the answers."

The Outsider includes a riveting short story by the acclaimed novelist Madeleine Thien, told from the "inside", from the point of view of a young girl whose father worked as a photographer for the Chinese government newspaper during the Cultural Revolution taking "thousands of images of things we know, or may not know, from history books." When the young girl is grown up and has a daughter of her own, she writes, "Once my father said to me, a photograph might be the future foretold. Therefore, ever since my daughter's birth, I have tried only to take photos when she is happy, fortunate and free. When she is ready, when she gives her consent to be seen. Only then do I ever snap a photo."

Elizabeth Heyert, formerly a world-renowned architectural photographer, established her reputation in the art world with her groundbreaking trilogy of experimental portraits, The Sleepers, The Travelers, and The Narcissists. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in numerous private collections. Her many books of and about photography include: The Travelers, the award-winning book from her series; The Sleepers; The Narcissists; Metropolitan Places, one of the classic anthologies of 20th-century interior design which she wrote and photographed; and The Glasshouse Years, a history of 19th-century portrait photography. Heyert lives and works in downtown Manhattan.

Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection, Simple Recipes, and three novels, including Dogs at the Perimeter. Her most recent book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction. The novel was named a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. Madeleine's work has been translated into twenty-five languages and her essays are widely available in The Guardian, the Globe & Mail, Brick, The New York Times and Al Jazeera. The youngest daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.