Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church, Lviv, Ukraine, 2022

Chien-Chi Chang’s photography and films explore the abstract concepts of alienation and connection. His investigation of the ties that bind one person to another draws on his own deeply divided immigrant experience as he explores the contrasting themes of hope and darkness, restriction and freedom.

Chang received his bachelor’s degree from Soochow University in 1984 and his master’s from Indiana University in 1990. He began his career as a photojournalist at The Seattle Times in 1991. Chang joined Magnum in 1995 and became a full member in 2001. He is based in Graz, Austria

He has documented people in fearful uncertainty: internally displaced Rohingya in Myanmar; the European refugee crisis; the war in Ukraine; Hong Kong democracy activists; and North Korean defectors escaping through China and Laos to Thailand and South Korea. This purgatory is something Chien-Chi Chang knows intimately. For decades, Chang has photographed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York along with those of their families back home in Fujian, China.