Tom Carter

An inveterate vagrant who flirts with pictures and words, Tom Carter spent 2 straight years backpacking a groundbreaking 35,000 miles across all 33 Chinese provinces, and was named "one of China's foremost explorers" by The World of Chinese magazine. His first book CHINA: Portrait of a People (2008, Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong) has been hailed as the most comprehensive book of photography on modern China ever published by a single author. He is also the editor of Unsavory Elements (2013, Earnshaw Books, Shanghai), an anthology about foreign expats in China. Carter contributed photographs to a critically acclaimed Chinese-language travelogue authored by his wife Hong Mei about their year backpacking together across India. Most recently, he penned the illustrated biography An American Bum in China (2019, Camphor Press, Taiwan). Tom Carter was born and raised in the City of San Francisco, graduated with a degree in Political Science from the American University in Washington, D.C., and has called China home since 2004.