Tom Carter

An inveterate vagrant who flirts with pictures and words, Tom Carter spent 2 straight years backpacking a groundbreaking 35,000 miles across all 33 Chinese provinces, and was named "one of China's foremost explorers" by The World of Chinese magazine. His first book "CHINA: Portrait of a People" (2008, Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong) has been hailed as the most comprehensive book of photography on modern China ever published by a single author. He is also the editor of "Unsavory Elements" (2013, Earnshaw Books, Shanghai), an anthology about foreign expats in China. Most recently, he penned the illustrated biography "An American Bum in China" (2019, Camphor Press, Taiwan). In 2024, at age 50, Carter entered pre-production to write and direct his first feature film - an 8-year-in-the-making passion project informed by his observations of counterculture and vice in Asia, and inspired by his lifelong love of horror cinema. Tom Carter was born and raised in the City of San Francisco, graduated with a degree in Political Science from the American University in Washington, D.C., and has called China home since 2004.