When George Morlock and his wife Danielle decided to travel to China last year, they didn’t want to explore the typical tourist traps. Instead they wanted to immerse themselves in the daily lives of the people they would encounter and gain a perspective of a culture entirely different and yet similar. The photographs they took are a social documentary of a way of life quickly disappearing as modernization rapidly overtakes traditional values, as rural areas and agrarian means of living give way to the relentless machinery of industry and urbanization.

The prints are loosely divided into three categories: landscapes, portraiture and city scenes.

Several of the landscapes are panoramas, stitched together digitally, seamlessly composed of as many as 120 photographs for a single image as much as four feet long. The process requires a steady precision; the arrangement of the camera is paramount as one misalignment can ruin an entire piece.

The panoramas encompass the terraced fields laboriously constructed over hundreds of years outside Guilin, to the Great Wall, and a study of a fishing village. Guilin is familiar to us as the site of China’s mythic and iconic scenery, full of rolling hills, winding streams and hazy fog captured here in Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terrace.

There is a meditative quality to Xing Ping Fishing Village, in which a fruit seller contemplates the seascape before him. He is surrounded by mountains, the water, the rocky beach upon which he sits and the pile of brightly colored pumelos (large citrus fruits) at his side.

The street scenes consist of stolen glimpses inside the hutongs of Beijing where people play card games and take smoke breaks.

The strongest body of work is the portraiture. There is an intimacy in the deep close ups of the elderly and the children. In today’s media we are constantly bombarded through advertisements and commercials by beautifully airbrushed images of the perfectly proportioned and surgically enhanced. By contrast, Morlock focuses on the elderly in several works and one can see every line, wrinkle and age spot, their countenances containing a world of topographical features expressing a depth and quality of character absent in the vacuous stares of mainstream celebrities, here today and gone tomorrow.

To Morlock, the elderly represent a connection to the past and are solidly grounded, stolidly present. Hard Labor is an image of an aged woman no taller than five feet, with a steady gaze and watery eyes carrying a heavy burden on her back, steadily motoring along through her day.

Warm Sun is a lined woman wearing a white cotton cap and silk floral scarf in a dark jacket basking in the warmth of the sun by the Summer Palace in Bejing. The composition is comparable to the works of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painters such as Brueghel.

Woman of the Village is a strikingly impish old woman with sparkling eyes, a shock of white hair with a pixie grin. One can trace the contours of her face and know her as a familiar friend. Initially reluctant to have her photograph taken, she shied away, concerned she was not pretty enough but was coaxed into having her image captured when Morlock persisted and assured her she was beautiful.

Rice Worker I is a prematurely aged laborer dozing in the sun on a hard wooden stool, his body bent from years toiling in the fields, his face shielded by a straw hat, his feet shod in thin worn leather shoes.

93 in Daxu is a matriarch seated regally in a wicker chair waiting to play cards with her friends, soon to celebrate her ninety-third birthday.

Riverbank captures a grandmotherly figure with her head half turned, wisps of her hair astray, the grooved lines in her forehead mimicking the terraced landscapes. Her soft delicate hands are clasped in front of her and are seen in the study, Waiting at Li River. A hint of her vanity is seen in the bright cobalt blue and white print of her sleeve.

Another image of Hands are those of a laborer’s, deeply lined and callused from decades of manual labor.

These rural residents of China’s villages are reminiscent of Rogovin’s Forgotten Ones, soon to be cast off as China accelerates its development.

The portraits are never intrusive, Morlock always maintains an air of reverence and respect towards his subjects and there is no taint of judgement or condescension. There is a serene element to the work. Even in the midst of busy market scenes, Morlock has found spare moments of solitude when his subjects wait for a ferry or while they nap in the sun.

The show will be on view at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum, 453 Porter Avenue, 11am-6pm daily until mid-February.