Gabriel Safdie has several projects on the go, including his upcoming calendar, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), featuring photographs he shot in Oaxaca, Mexico. | Photo: Chen Feng
Photograph from Gabriel’s collection taken in Oaxaca, Mexico, in November 2016. | Photo: Gabriel Safdie
During his time as company leader, Safdie became completely fascinated with China. In the country for two months each year on business, he’d always take time out for himself to travel to a new location and explore, taking photographs.
These visits now inform his book, provisionally titled The China Challenge: 33 Years of Work and Travel in the Middle Kingdom. The semi-autobiographical docudrama chronicles the breakneck changes the country has undergone in the last three decades, particularly since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, when Chinese troops ultimately fired on and killed many of the demonstrators.
“The massacre was a pivotal moment in Chinese history, where the country flipped over from communism to totalitarian capitalism, more capitalist than what we have in the west,” Safdie says.
On top of the book and the calendars, Safdie often exhibits his photos, including in the Middle Kingdom itself. Variations of his particularly popular exhibit “Changing China through the Eyes of a Canadian Friend,” have visited Beijing, Qingdao, Tai’an and Hangzhou, among other cities.
As he says, “The Chinese like seeing my perspective of their country. I have insight into the life there that they seem to appreciate.”
Giving back
After earning a BComm from McGill University, Safdie completed an accelerated BA in literature and creative writing at Sir George Williams University, one of Concordia’s founding institutions, in the early 1960s. He followed that with a master’s in the same field from the University of British Columbia, and then continued studying for his PhD in literature at the University of London and then the Sorbonne, in Paris.
Yet Safdie always remained fond of Concordia. In 2016 he donated $5,000 to the university to create the Gabriel Safdie Award in Creative Writing. Recently, he increased the gift by $1,000 so it could be split three ways between aspiring authors, poets and playwrights.
Safdie chose Concordia because these days, “it’s such a dynamic and exciting place to be,” he says. “I’m hearing great things from faculty and especially students, which says a lot. It’s inspiring to see a university going through such a good phase.”
He hopes that his gift will encourage people entering the literary world, where it can often take a very long time to become accomplished.
As Safdie says: “I just think it’s a great thing to do, and for me, that feels right.”
