Known for her unconventional approach to the portrait, and above all for her trilogy The Sleepers, The Travelers and The Narcissists, Elizabeth Heyert again takes the role of observer and voyeur, in work made during four trips to China.

Fascinated by the rituals of Chinese amateurs, who seem to shoot incessantly and with an intimacy with their surroundings that borders on stagecraft, she set out to photograph the Chinese photographing each other. Few possess family albums from the past, since so much was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, which may explain the intensity of what she saw. She called the project The Outsider because, as a westerner in the east and a stranger in a foreign culture, she let herself be a spectator of the relation between the person shooting and the person shot.