Beijing 1998–2007 is a book in development, drawn from the photographs Daniel Traub made while living and working in China. He moved to Beijing from New York in 1998, just out of graduate school, intending to stay a year or two, and remained nearly a decade. He worked as a cameraman for German television, shooting reports on China’s transformation, and on his own days wandered the lanes with a handheld camera, drawn increasingly to the city’s peripheries and to the migrant workers who lived there, the labor force that made the boom possible. In 2005 he began working with a 4×5 camera, and the pictures became slower and more deliberate.

The photographs appear in the order they were made, year by year, with nothing re-sequenced or paired. The decade was a threshold between two Chinas: the looser, more open years that followed the 1990s, and the more assured country that took shape after 2008. Whatever changed, in the city and in the way Traub saw it, changed in that order.