Born in Ogden, Utah in 1961, André Eichman is a fine art documentary photographer who has been documenting humanity for the past 25 years.

André studied fine art at San Diego where he developed a passion for photography. He then specialized in fashion photography for the first 10 years of his career focusing on high profile fashion shoots for the likes of Vogue, W Magazine, Eve, and Style Magazine. His work took him to New York, London, Paris, Thailand, and all over Asia. André’s first love has always been documentary photography, and his travels enabled him to pursue his love of reportage.

André eventually moved away from fashion and began focusing solely on fine art documentary photography. He worked for various magazines including Sunday Times Magazine, Royal Geographical Magazine and Wanderlust, concentrating on “the positive, showing the triumphs of the human spirit.” Again, the demands of his work took him all around the world. Through his travels André began to focus on Asia, and developed a fascination for the divergence of cultures within China. This work took up the majority of the last 10 years, and the resulting body of work is stunning.

André has had solo shows in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and California, and his work now exists in many private collections.

This year, André Eichman’s current exhibition is called – ‘The Chairman And I’ and was shown in Hong Kong, Tokyo and is currently being exhibited in Shanghai.

‘The Chairman and I’ is a series of portraits I’ve been photographing over the last 6 years. It involves a statue of Chairman Mao, which I carry around with me on my travels throughout China, recording time, date and place that the photo was taken. What started out as a light-hearted project, took a different turn when I went to Gansu in Jiangxi Province to visit my Father (who was teaching at a Medical college there). Thanks to one of his coworkers I was invited to meet General Gu Ping who had been Premier Zhou Enlai's wife’s bodyguard during the Long March. Speaking to him and listening to the tales of hardship and endurance he and his comrades had to go through swayed the direction this project has now gone.

‘The Chairman And I’ is a visual social study of sorts. A loose gauge, looking at where China was sixty years ago, as opposed to today. I’ve ventured around China with all its contradictions, pondering how Mao might fit into today’s society, and though I can draw no concrete conclusions it’s been a fascinating insight into modern day China.”