Cina 1974 gathers architect and designer Gae Aulenti's photographs of a 1974 journey through Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, a 96-page black-and-white photobook made as China began reopening to the world.
Aulenti's eye moves between sweeping panoramas and small, telling details — bicycles, shopfronts, the disciplined choreography of collective life — capturing a country suspended between millennia of tradition and the modernisation Mao's China was only beginning to impose.
A designer's gaze on a nation on the edge of transformation.
