The writer who can really shoot—the dream of generations of penny-pinching newspaper editors—is the rarest of creatures. Because I’ve failed at it enough times to know the difference between snapping off a few frames between interviews and really seeing a story, I’ve decided that it demands competing sections of the brain, operating in binary fashion: one on, the other off. Howard French, alas, proves otherwise. After a career in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and Asia, much of it as a bureau chief for the Times, French has published “Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life” a chronicle of five years in Shanghai, with writing by Qiu Xiaolong (and an introduction by Teju Cole). French’s photos are intimate, unadorned, black-and-white. They capture moments at the center of a Chinese city in a way that is faithful to those of us who know these places, without resorting to the usual Porsche-beside-a-donkey images of today’s China. It’s Shanghai, but I prefer the ones that are placeless—the photos with no Chinese script to give them away: the alley portraits and sidewalk scenes that could be Helen Levitt’s New York, where the settlers were from County Cork not Hunan Province, but who wore similar anxieties and aspirations on their faces. Some questions for him:

E.O.: We usually think of China as a place of constant motion, but your pictures of Shanghai capture the opposite: people sitting, lying, staring, and on and on. Deliberate?

H.F.: There are a few things going on with the stillness that runs through these images. The work began with old film cameras, especially a 1956 vintage Rolleiflex, with which one must expose and focus manually, the latter being done by looking downward into the camera, where its ground-glass screen is housed. Everything about these cameras is slow, including the black-and-white film, which conditioned every aspect of making an image.

If one embraces the slowness, it really favors the distillation of a moment, which is the opposite of a great deal of digital photography done today, in which one can take an almost limitless number of photos, often in quick succession, and hope for the best. With the Rolleiflex, there are twelve images per roll of film. On a very good day during this project, I might have shot three rolls of film.

I didn’t think about it so consciously at the very outset, but after I had begun to amass a little bit of this work, the idea of distilling moments in time and of imparting a great stillness began to appeal to me very strongly. It seemed appropriate to my subject: a world poised on the edge of destruction, which I was watching crumble and vanish week by week.

The other thing which must be said is that I had to learn to make myself disappear in these landscapes, which wasn’t easy, given my conspicuous height. This didn’t mean hiding or quickly stealing furtive captures. Rather, it meant a lot of standing around, shifting one’s weight from one foot to the other, inching closer to subjects bit by bit, and simply waiting until people were no longer focussed on the presence of a foreigner taking pictures. It is true that I was drawn to many subjects who were, as you say, sitting, lying, and staring—that’s partly because this is what one found in this world of these neighborhoods, where life was lived out on the street, in public. And this style of life is disappearing just as surely as the demolished buildings.

Please compare Shanghai and Beijing.

There is something to the cliché that life in Shanghai is about materialism—money and fashion and art de vivre—while life in Beijing is about ideas and (for some) politics and art. Historically speaking, Shanghai has paid a doubly high price for its relationship with art. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was the locus of a lot of avant-garde experimentation and cosmopolitanism, but the city was purged of these tendencies after the Revolution, and treated as ideologically suspicious and unreliable. Even now, it is held in suspicion by the rest of China, somewhat exaggeratedly, for being somehow in thrall to foreign currents, both Western and Japanese, and not entirely Chinese. Beyond that, many Chinese regard Shanghainese as being excessively proud and, in part because of the local dialect, not especially welcoming or friendly. Beijing, on the other hand, can be claimed by any Chinese.

This family, wedged into a sliver of space, resonates with my experiences in China. What’s the story behind the picture?

This image was taken in the neighborhood that once surrounded the now demolished old cloth market, a warren of narrow streets where fabric was sold and tailors worked. The images in the book come from a half dozen neighborhoods that I visited over and over for a period of years, getting to know their streets and alleys and cul de sacs and their light and rhythms as intimately as I’ve come to know any place. Like all of the images that show interiors, this photograph was taken in the final year of the project, when I returned to Shanghai in the summer of 2009 on what was essentially a dare. A year after I had moved to New York, the great documentary photographer, Danny Lyon, told me that before I published a book I must try to explore the homes of the people who lived in the world of my photographs, and include that side of their life. For three months, I knocked on the doors of strangers all day, every day. It was something I had never done before, but through practice and persistence I gradually became able to achieve what felt to me like a natural and intimate effect.

Often, the work required lingering, sometimes for a very long time, until people began to pay less attention to me and simply relax. This scene, with the mother and her children was, like a few others, just something I stumbled into. It was made within seconds of entering that tiny space, and nobody seemed distracted by my presence.