Birdhead

Birdhead is a Shanghai-based photographic duo. 

In 2004 artists Ju Weiyu (born 1980) and Song Tao (born 1979) began to collaborate as the photographic duo Birdhead.

They were both born in Shanghai and both graduated from the Shanghai School of Arts and Crafts in 2000.

The duo Using the medium of photography to capture and make sense of their experience of daily life in the metropolis of Shanghai, they create large volumes of snapshot-style images showing their existence within the contemporary urban environment.

Occasionally, the artists insert themselves and their friends into the scenes, which are individually insignificant, but collectively lend insight into what makes Shanghai, the representative

Chinese metropolis, tick. Lending a philosophical quality to the work, Birdhead photographs Chinese characters they encounter around the city, that are “either still repeatedly in use or are almost obsolete in contemporary life,” and collage them into classical poems.

“What is important are the links that are produced through the juxtaposition of the significance of the poetry and the significance of the photographs that we constantly take of people in our physical environments, and the atmospheres that they each establish,” the pair says.

More: Instagram