Your clothes, your child’s toys, even the device you use to read these words may have been made in China. They are among the $100 billion of goods that the United States imports from China each year — an exchange that has become an important issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.

But the people who manufacture these goods are rarely mentioned in political talking points or thought of by consumers.

In “Faces of Made in China,” a series of typological portraits looking at workers inside six Chinese factories, the photographer Lucas Schifres seeks to consider the otherwise anonymous people who produce our essential possessions by looking directly into their eyes.

Lucas Schifres/Pictobank

“Looking at a human face mobilizes more brain cells than looking at anything else,” said Mr. Schifres, 39. It was a simple idea, meant to present a new dimension to the story; to put a face to labor in China – which has come into the spotlight amid United States election campaign debate over trade with China.

As a Bloomberg photographer, Mr. Schifres had seen his share of Chinese factories. He began covering the tale of Chinese growth when he relocated from Paris to Beijing by way of Hong Kong in 2006. A year later, he moved to Shanghai to work freelance.

It wasn’t long before the saga of “The Chinese Factory” grew tiresome. “I get assignments from magazines and they all want the story of ‘Made in China,’ ” he said. The topic ranged from the economics to industrial pollution. Each leaned toward the enormity of the industrial machine, not the people behind it.

Mr. Schifres returned often to Zhenhua Port Machinery Company, a factory that produces steel cranes on the Yangtze River about an hour from Shanghai. Every day, before the factory’s 7 a.m. shift, members of each team would arrange themselves in straight lines for a pep talk from their foreman.

“I thought it was an interesting moment,” Mr. Schifres said, “and I thought, ‘I’d like to know more about these people.’ ”

In January 2011, he received permission to make portraits, shooting 300 workers in five consecutive days, often during their lunch hour. He had hoped to photograph 100 people, “but you convince the foreman,” he said, “and then he brings the whole team, and then why would you say no?”

From there, he traveled with a mobile studio to five more factories – one near Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province; one in Yiwu, also in Zhejiang; and three textile factories near Guangzhou, in Guangdong province. He went wherever he was welcomed.

Like the portraits in Richard Avedon’s “In the American West,” which inspired Mr. Schifres, his photos are stark and simple, generally cropped to focus on the faces. Unlike Avedon’s portraits, many of his subjects look content – like Ma Ying and Zou Saihua (Slide 9), a married couple at the crane factory near Shanghai.

Many factories didn’t respond well to the unusual request from a foreign photographer. Mr. Schifres’s assistant would explain that the project was about daily life, sometimes invoking pride to persuade the factory owners to say yes.

Lucas Schifres/Pictobank

But when they interviewed the workers, the photographer and his team found that the pride was really there.

“The answer was always, ‘Oh, we’re very proud; we’re happy that the products go all around the world,’ ” Mr. Schifres said. “‘This is good for China; this is good for our generation.’”

“They have absolutely no idea about controversies around the world about the Made in China products,” he added.

From Zhang Hao, a 16-year-old who was already onto his second job as a manufacturer at a factory in Yiwu (Slide 5), to Wang Jang, a 22-year-old from Chongqing with a 3-year-old daughter (Slide 3), many of the stories followed similar threads. Most of the workers had moved from rural areas to make a better living, hoping to send money home or make a better life for their children. But Mr. Schifres was captivated by the little details.

“They’re people, too,” he said. “China is not this machine the size of a country that pops out cheap T-shirts without anybody doing it.”

Mr. Schifres hopes to show “Made in China” in Shanghai after it shows at Galerie photo12 in Paris, where he lives with his wife. He would like to pursue similar portraiture work elsewhere, following in the footsteps of Sebastião Salgado, who traveled the world for “Workers.”

Sometimes, he said, the portraits work. Sometimes they don’t. “Sometimes people give more, or people are easier to read,” Mr. Schifres said.

In the end, he prefers the portraits that give a glimpse into the life of their subjects.

“Maybe we’re fantasizing life stories, and that’s not fair,” Mr. Schifres said. “But maybe we are right, in a way, because that’s what portraits are about – communication between the portrait and a viewer.”

Lucas Schifres/Pictobank

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