Pagoda by Lin Shu

Since 2017, Lin Shu has traveled across nearly every region of China to photograph over 300 pagodas. Not as monuments, not as typological specimens — but as singular objects lodged in singular places, each carrying its own charge.

Shot on large-format black-and-white film with a tilt-shift lens, the images are deliberately soft at the edges, pushing the towers out of documentary time and into something harder to name. The blur isn't decorative. It strips away context that distracts, and keeps what matters: the weight of the structure, the quality of the surrounding air, the gap between what you can see and what you can't quite reach.

Lin grew up in Fujian, steeped in temple rituals and stories of spirits. His interest in pagodas is less architectural than it is personal — he's after the ghost inside the process, the thing photography reaches for without ever fully catching. The book follows that search across Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Anhui, Hangzhou and beyond, from ancient timber towers to a concrete-and-glass museum whose proportions earned it a place in the frame anyway.

Pagoda closes a project nearly a decade in the making.