Traveling Light

A girl looks through a wall made of pipes and bamboo while class is in session at Dabao Elementary, Dabao Village, Guangxi, China.

Tommy Xie

Story by Tess Long; Photography by Tommy Xie

Snapping photos day after day for his graduate thesis at Southern Illinois University, Dr. Xie discovered the chef had an unusual nightly routine of heading to an obscure college watering hole where he was a championship billiards player.

“He was popular at the bar and I initially thought that people just wanted to play pool with him,” Dr. Xie said. “Later, I found out some really wanted to talk to him. They brought an English-Chinese dictionary and tried to teach him some basic English words. His friends there cared about him.”

Throughout his thesis project, which resulted in a prize-winning photo essay called “Living Foreign,” Dr. Xie remembered the words of his mentor, photojournalist Phillip Greer of the Chicago Tribune: getting a single shot is easy, anyone can get a cool shot, but to tell a complete story through a sequence of images is the ultimate challenge.

An image of Zheng, an undocumented immigrant chef at a Chinese restaurant, eating soup at home. This photo was a part of Dr. Xie’s prize-winning photo essay called “Living Foreign.”

Tommy Xie

Dr. Xie is now an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences; for the past decade he has passed along to Fairfield students some of the same principles that were passed on to him: passion for the field of photojournalism; defense of the “public’s right to know”; empathy for one’s subjects; and a belief that photojournalism can make a difference in our world.

A native of Shanghai, China, Dr. Xie came up as a “news boy” through a “very different media ecosystem” than the one in which he now teaches. He recalls editorial meetings in China where news stories on politically sensitive topics were weeded out.

Chinese tourists in a choreographic pose with a horse and yak near Qinghai Lake, China. This image was one of the 20 finalists for the Nikonians Photography Award in 2017.

Tommy Xie

“I realized that I didn’t have the kind of creative freedom that I wanted, to tell the stories that I felt were important,” Dr. Xie said. “So, I took my journalism passion to the U.S.”

A woman of Dabao Village, China, finishes field work at the entrance of the village. Because of the village’s geographically insulated location, farming allows for the villagers to be fully self-sufficient.

Tommy Xie

Dr. Xie’s photographs often exhibit a cross-cultural, global viewpoint — accessible for their quirky details and their startling juxtaposition of worlds: In one, a ruddy-cheeked young girl tosses a fish back into the waters of Qinghai Lake, in the Tibetan region; in another, a man kneels on his prayer rug adjacent to both a blossoming cherry tree and a highway guardrail in Brooklyn, New York.

A man kneels on his prayer rug adjacent to both a blossoming cherry tree and a highway guardrail in Brooklyn, New York.

Tommy Xie

As both a journalist and an academic, what interests Dr. Xie is the instance where his experience at the moment of snapping the photo opens a window on something larger — a bigger, more nuanced story that requires research and further study and analysis. “In my ideal world,” he explained, “photography and scholarship are reciprocal.”

So for instance, Dr. Xie learned that the boy tossing fish back into Qinghai lake was actually trying to preserve the lake’s delicate ecosystem. Climate change and pollution have damaged the fish population. Highly dependent on the fish, lake birds are leaving and the ecosystem is in collapse. In a few generations, this lake could be gone. Dr. Xie remembered the children calling out to him from the shore: “We have to throw them back into the lake so they don’t get trapped in lake grass and die young.”

“As a photographer, I can capture images of a few Tibetan kids catching fish against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset. But as a storyteller, I should also tell the whole story where desperation and hope intertwined, so that when you look back at the images, you feel that ‘beautiful’ is nearly useless to describe what the children were doing,” Dr. Xie said. “We already have scientific evidence for climate change, but the resonance of human experiences is desperately lacking. By telling powerful and relatable stories of those affected by the issue, photography can help bridge the gap.”

A Tibetan girl throws a young fish back into Qinghai Lake, China, in an effort to save the area’s delicate ecosystem.

Tommy Xie

In his courses, Dr. Xie hopes to inspire a sense of wonder in his students and instill a confidence in them to venture into the unknown.

“I want to show my students how different and wonderful a life experience they can have if they push themselves out of their comfort zone,” Dr. Xie said.