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| Henri Cartier-Bresson |
Cartier-Bresson is Here
On June 16, 1958, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson arrived in Beijing. According to a press release from the Chinese Photographers Association (CPA), Cartier-Bresson came to China on a “photographic visit” for a book to be entitled “Ten Years of the People's Republic of China.”1 As “friends will be treated with good wine,”2 on June 26, the president and vice president of the CPA received Cartier-Bresson and hosted him at a banquet according to Chinese etiquette. During Cartier-Bresson's shooting in Beijing, the CPA also sent someone to accompany him.
Cartier-Bresson's relationship with China can be traced back to 1949 when he came to China for almost a year to take photographs, commissioned by the American magazine Life. China was at the crossroads of history that year. He took many photographs, some of which were published in Life pictorial. After returning to the West, he published a large photo book, D’une Chine à l’autre, 1954 (in English, From One China to the Other, 1956). The French version’s preface was written by Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading figure in French existentialism. Before his 1958 trip to China, Cartier-Bresson and the book were characterized by the senior members of the mainland Chinese photographers’ community—represented by the leaders of CPA—as “exposing the darkness of the Nationalist Party and objectively reporting on the rebirth of China by contrasting the old China with the new.”3 The book had a great influence in France and Western European countries. However, in the opinion of many mainland Chinese photographers some of his photos were “not clear in intention” and “did not reflect any social significance.”4
His Chinese hosts nonetheless had a lot of expectations for this photo-trip to China. In 1954, Cartier-Bresson was invited to visit the Soviet Union and published a photo book, People of Moscow.5 The basic judgment of the heads of the CPA was that the book reflected “the happy and beautiful life of the Soviet people” and was also welcomed by European and American countries.6 The reaction from the Soviet press verified this. The Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper) also had an article about Cartier-Bresson, praising him, calling his work “the most brilliant masterpiece” and considering him “among the best contemporary photographers in the world.”7 At this peculiar historical moment in the People's Republic of China when "twenty years are concentrated in a day,” it goes without saying that Cartier-Bresson's planned book “Ten Years of The People's Republic of China” could help produce the same effect and maybe go even beyond that. The expectations of the hosts were self-evident.
At the time, the “French photographer” was addressed by several similar-sounding names among his Chinese colleagues.8 The arbitrary and confusing transliteration of his name also reflects the degree of attention he received. The internal newsletter of the CPA published a brief introduction of the 50-year-old French photographer's “curriculum vitae and his creative activities.”9 It is said that Cartier-Bresson's education was equivalent to the level of American high school, or better, and that he had studied Latin and some other languages, and painting. The essay claims that “because he was interested in what he could see, he became interested in photography.” After this presumptuous statement, the essay goes on to state that in 1933 Cartier-Bresson accepted his first professional assignment from a Spanish magazine, but it was difficult for him to say exactly when he turned from amateur to professional photographer. “His vision of photography focuses on what interests him.”10 “Focusing on what interests him” could be seen as one of Cartier-Bresson's photographic choices, or even orientation, the essay continues. This is a clear misinterpretation of Cartier-Bresson, whose main take on photography was not adequately analyzed. The short essay characterizes Cartier-Bresson's photography as “good at capturing people’s various movements in ordinary daily life” and “reflecting life obliquely.”11 This style of his has a considerable impact in countries around the world. The brief description in the CPA journal concludes: “Cartier-Bresson is a famous French photographer and one of the world's leading photographers.” 12 The essay explains that Cartier-Bresson’s photographs have been widely circulated in various countries, especially in capitalist countries. It is said that by 1958, he had published From One China to the Other, The People of Moscow, The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson’s Photography, and Ballet and the People of Europe.13
Distance
On June 20, 1958, arranged by the CPA, Cartier-Bresson went to Beijing to take pictures at the construction site of the Shisanling Reservoir (a reservoir close to the Ming Tombs). The CPA appointed Chen Bo (1925-2015), a young photographer, to accompany him. Although Cartier-Bresson's photo-shooting session lasted only a few hours that day, “his special way of doing photography” left a “deep impression” on Chen.14 Chen recorded his experience:
Cartier-Bresson deserves to be called a “machine gunner.” On the site, he took photos of almost everything he saw, and he took many shots of each image. In less than four hours that day, he used seven rolls of 135 black-and-white film and less than one roll of 135 colour film.15
The November 1956 issue of Sheying yewu (Photo work) mentioned that Cartier-Bresson once claimed that “in order to choose one [photo], you need to throw away dozens.”16 This indeed was witnessed by Chen Bo.
Why did Cartier-Bresson take so many photos? In Chen Bo's opinion, besides Cartier-Bresson's habit of “shooting more,” he was more likely inspired by the enthusiasm of the Chinese people in the socialist construction. Chen Bo said, for example, the moment Cartier-Bresson entered the site, he started to take pictures voraciously, stating: “I feel I see the pyramids! It's amazing!”17 There was another incident that stunned Chen Bo. When Cartier-Bresson took pictures at the construction site, not only did he not arrange any “poses” and not want the subjects to notice him, but rather even gave up shooting when he was noticed. For example, outside a tent on the site, a PLA soldier brought a bundle of cucumbers for other soldiers to eat as fruit, and the soldiers reached under the tent to pick up the cucumbers. When Cartier-Bresson saw it, “like a cat trying to catch a rat,” he dashed over. But when the soldier who brought the cucumbers saw someone try to take a picture of him, he smiled at the camera. Cartier-Bresson immediately put away the camera, shaking his head to say sorry. Cartier-Bresson said to his entourage: “Many things do not give you the chance to think twice. Catch it when you see it.” For this reason, Cartier-Bresson also specifically camouflaged his two Leica M3 cameras by painting them black. He said it was to reduce their presence so he wouldn’t be noticed. He also said, with an analogy of photography and fishing, that you’d better not scare the fish away if you want to catch it.18
In the eyes of Chen Bo, another special feature of Cartier-Bresson's work was that he shot more close-ups and fewer big scenes. Someone told Cartier-Bresson if he had come a few days earlier, there were more people and scenes; it would have been better. In response, Cartier-Bresson was not convinced and said: “Even in the present situation, I can have a lot of people in my photos.” Once again, he said metaphorically, “A big scene is like a pot of rice, and a close-up is like a dish—a variety of very flavourful dishes. If there is only rice and no dishes, it is not good.” Cartier-Bresson revealed that when he was in the Soviet Union, he saw the Forty Years of Soviet Photoart exhibition and had a good conversation with many photographers. He criticized the Soviet exhibition for having “too much rice” and “too few tasty dishes.” Cartier-Bresson claimed that the Soviet photographers agreed with him.19
Cartier-Bresson carefully chose backgrounds for his photographs. This detail was also noticed by Chen Bo, who was an experienced photographer and knew the construction site very well.
If the subject was a working person, Cartier-Bresson chose a background adequate to show the site; if the subject was an object, he chose a working person as the background. A few broken gloves, a pair of scissors and a ball of thread were placed on a wooden board in the middle of the dam berm, and there was no one around. When Cartier-Bresson took this picture, he did not just shoot the still life. He shot it from a bird’s eye perspective: there were many people working below the berm.
On the top of the dam sat strings of baskets. Cartier-Bresson also chose to shoot them from above, using the distant workers as the background. When he saw broken baskets stacked like a mountain at the repair spot, he ran over to take a picture but chose the dam as the background. He opened his arms wide and said “this side (north) is the ‘photo’, this side (south) is not a ‘photo’, because this side (north) has a dam, the dam is a mountain; the basket is another mountain, a photo of two mountains.20
After describing the details of the escorting task, Chen Bo offered his two thoughts. Cartier-Bresson's photography style of capturing fast movements and human subjects was worth learning from. The major drawback of the photographs of the Shisanling Reservoir taken during previous photo-trips organized by the CPA was that they captured too little of the people's movements (especially close-ups). For that reason, most of the photos were not lively enough. In comparison, Chen Bo concluded: “This shortcoming is also a common problem of all of our photojournalism. Meanwhile, we have not paid as much attention as Cartier-Bresson did to people – people who do the socialist construction work. This is something we should improve.”21 Chen Bo also wrote about “the shortcomings of Cartier-Bresson's photography.” He believed that Cartier-Bresson's photography had “a tendency to capture more superficial phenomena and [tended] towards objectivist reporting. These shortcomings stemmed from Cartier-Bresson’s conviction that ‘I just want to see more with my eyes and not to hear with my ears (meaning to listen to the hosts).’” This, according to Chen Bo, inevitably led him to look at superficial phenomena and not to understand the essence of things. “As for the problem of objectivism and the problem of seeking for some sort of amusement, Chen Bo excused Cartier-Bresson: “It is not entirely his fault that he had limitations in his understanding.”22
Symposium with the Photographers in Beijing
I have seen many photographs in China, some of them are very good, but some I don't like. I once saw a picture of a woman holding a bundle of wheat and showing a wild smile. Of course, the harvest justifies a smile, but not necessarily a smile that wild. In the field, of course, it was dusty and sweaty, but this woman was very clean. The labour was intense, but when it was time to rest, it naturally should be relaxing.23
On July 16, 1958, the CPA invited Cartier-Bresson, who was taking pictures in Beijing, to attend a symposium with the photographers in the capital. As the keynote speaker of the meeting, Cartier-Bresson shared his views on the photographic truth in the context of the current situation in mainland China. He said,
Life is not in the studio; it is something real. As a realist-photographer, one should be faithful to life. If one photographs something that has been changed by the photographer, it is not real. Life is rich and colourful, and we can't take pictures according to a formula.
An arranged picture is not life. It does not leave an impression on people. It is finished as soon as it appears. We need to be able to present life sensitively, so that when people see our work, they feel it is moving as blood is flowing in their veins. For me, the greatest pleasure is to shoot something that people say is real, so we need to live among anyone and everyone, and I think this is realism. In short, be faithful to life.24
Will the posed photos be noticed as arranged? Cartier-Bresson replied: “Posing is not convincing, even if you arrange it well, people will notice.” He claimed, for example, that one does not have to taste a dish to tell if there is pepper in it – one just needs to smell it. Cartier-Bresson also presented some of his own ideas on photography from a preface he once wrote for a photobook. Regarding the question of "subject and form" in photography, he stated:
Photography is to express a whole idea in a short period of time. It must express the central or most important part of a thing. There are two main aspects, namely, the subject and the form.
Life is the subject of photography. To present life, the photographer needs to start with the emotions in his heart and combine them with the external things he sees. External things can affect our feelings, vice versa, our feelings can also affect our view of external things. This is called combining the internal and the external. This combination can be seen everywhere in our life.
The form of expression is the composition of lines and surfaces, through which our feelings are expressed in the photograph. The subject and the form of expression cannot be separated but are tightly combined. When we take pictures, combining the subject and the form of expression occurs as a very short process, and it is also an instinct.
The combination of theme and expression can be compared to this: if the theme is good but the form of expression is not, there is no power; just like a fish dish at dinner, there is no flesh but only fish bones on the plate. Before taking pictures, we should already have a certain view of things. When we pick up the camera, we want to express this view.
As to the subject, it is like a diamond with multiple facets; these facets are the details of life. We need to join these facets, and join them well. Therefore, doing photography is like telling a story; a few photos should reveal the moral of a story. Then we go into the minute, vivid details to express the theme, but never forget the theme for the sake of details.25
Cartier-Bresson concluded, “So, in front of the photographer lies the question of how to show real life. Life goes on and on, and we should hurry up in order to present it in the process of living. Life can't be reproduced after it passes. When you catch it, you catch it; if you can't catch it, you lose it forever.”26
Bad meat never makes a good dish
In response to some photographers’ questions regarding the use of equipment, Cartier-Bresson replied:
A photographic work is the product of three things: the mind, the eyes, and the heart of a person in combination. These three things express the thoughts of the photographer and his personal feelings. The camera is just a tool, just as a pen is used to express an idea. It is the expression that counts, not the pen itself.27
How to take pictures? Cartier-Bresson is recorded saying:
The camera should not be placed on a tripod; the photographer's feet should not be mounted on wheels (sitting in a car). He should keep moving around. His movement should be fast and agile. In terms of forms of expression, the painter can imagine his composition, but the photographer can only take the existing things. In fact, the real thing sometimes already composes a good picture for you and asks you to shoot it. Therefore, time and space are two important factors for the photographer in shooting.28
Cartier-Bresson described his own photographic experience: “I often move around in the field, choose what I think is a good angle to shoot; I am among the people who are in my photos and I don’t let them notice me. ... As for the arrangement of light, that is a purely technical matter. In shooting it should depend on the angle of the shot.”29
Upon request, Cartier-Bresson also described how he uses cameras:
I use small cameras rather than large ones, just as a hunter does not carry a cannon to hunt. I also do not like cameras with 1:1 aspect ratio, because the square composition and real life do not match. I believe that a good photo should never be cropped and relying on darkroom techniques does not make a bad photo good.30
“Bad meat never makes a good dish,” Cartier-Bresson added.
The Cartier-Bresson Dilemma
Cartier-Bresson left China on October 4 of that year. On that very day, Cartier-Bresson wrote an inscription for the CPA as farewell remark.
I was delighted meeting the Chinese photographers, getting acquainted with them, and talking with them about our common profession. Although we live in different worlds, our profession is to present all lives directly and naturally according to our individual sensibilities.
We have a great responsibility as we record and convey history that we witness to millions of people in different countries.31
In this rather diplomatic “inscription,” Cartier-Bresson did not make a direct assessment of the working conditions of Chinese photographers. The second paragraph, however, seems to have a deeper meaning, referring to something else. What does Cartier-Bresson mean by “a great responsibility” and “history”? Does it imply a sense of disapproval of the behaviours and works of the photographers he met in China? Cartier-Bresson came to China at a time when the Great Leap Forward movement was in full swing, and photographers were also in a state of exuberance. The Great Leap Forward in agriculture was characterized by posed photos of more and more people standing on densely planted rice. Industrial reports enthusiastically praised backyard small blast furnaces that were alleged to produce steel. Various types of manipulation of facts were prevalent. Even in photographs of everyday life, the trend of heavy manipulation was prevalent. Cartier-Bresson had been considered “one of the world's most famous photojournalists” and known since the 1930s for his aesthetics of “decisive moment”32 —a moment that reveals the essence of things—and his aversion to "arranged" photographs and manipulated environments. What did he think of these Chinese photographers, who shared a "common profession" with him, and their works?
What kind of pictures would Cartier-Bresson take when he came to mainland China? Would he be equally happy and excited? The Chinese photographic community soon came to a negative conclusion: “However, when Cartier-Bresson made his despicable distortion of the Great Leap Forward and the People's Commune with his photographs in China, his outlook became clear to everyone.”33
On May 19, 1959, the Department of Creation Facilitation of the Chinese Photographers Association held a small conference aimed to “study the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's ‘realistic’ approach to photography.”34 More than ten people attended the meeting, including leaders of the CPA in Beijing, comrades from different departments of the association, editors of photographic journals, and comrades working on photographic theory. A year earlier, some of them had attended the banquet welcoming the French guest. This meeting focused on the discussion of Cartier-Bresson’s second shooting in China in 1958. The minutes of the meeting show that everyone was dissatisfied with the photos taken by Cartier-Bresson in our country last year, and many comrades thought that he had captured only the isolated random phenomena in life, and therefore he could not correctly reflect the essence of our people’s life. His newly published photos of our country in the American magazines Life and Queen actually denied the achievements of our country in the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and objectively served the anti-Chinese propaganda led by the American imperialists.
Then, participants further dissected Cartier-Bresson's creative method, his stand, and views. Some people thought that his creative method was to use the form of news reportage to confront life and to break the tradition of Western photography salons. He was progressive in this case compared with the salon school. However, there was also no middle path in doing photography. Although Cartier-Bresson boasted realism and the so-called plunging into the thick of life, he in fact did not go into the thick of life and could not truly reflect the essence of things. He was bound to capture only the surface of life, some random phenomena, and to distort life. It was easier to deceive people who did not know the truth. In this aspect he is worse than the salon school.
Many people thought that Cartier-Bresson himself often said that he usually took photos without listening to others, and that he was not willing to do research. As long as it suited his taste, he grabbed it. Obviously, his “taste” was his stand, his views and his goal. It was no accident that his work was welcomed by the reactionary magazines in the United States. Because it suited the tastes of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois press gave him a lot of publicity. The conclusion was: “the conference was a lively discussion, and a general agreement was reached on the evaluation of Cartier-Bresson's approach to photography.”35
Until Cartier-Bresson's departure, the hosting institution and his companies still treated him as a “friend of China” and knew that the purpose of his trip was to publish a book of photographs entitled “Ten Years of the People's Republic of China.” In 1949, when China was at its crossroads, Cartier-Bresson came to China to take photos. Those photographs reached China 5 years later. They were interpreted as “reflecting the situation of the reactionary Kuomintang government in the midst of a storm" and "reflecting the darkness and chaos of the old China under Kuomintang rule.”36 In 1958, even professionals in the photographic field only knew that “Cartier-Bresson's photographs were widely circulated in various countries, especially in capitalist ones.”37 Indeed, Cartier-Bresson’s “outlook” had become clear to everyone, but his departure on October 4, 1958 still left a dilemma for the photographic world in mainland China, especially in photojournalism. On the one hand, as a “bourgeois photographer,” his “outlook” had been characterized as the opposite of the proletariat and revolutionary photographers in the new socialist China. Cartier-Bresson's position and views were considered the fundamental antithesis of “ours,” completely irreconcilable. But on the other hand, Cartier-Bresson's ways and methods of doing photography did have “a momentary influence on some of our comrades.”38 “In particular, when we looked at his photographs of foreign countries at first glance, before studying him seriously, we were often paralyzed by the vividness and naturalness of their appearance, and praised them spontaneously.”39
Cartier-Bresson's second visit to China (mid-June to October 4, 1958) coincided with the beginning of a nationwide discussion on truth in photojournalism and related issues. This discussion, initiated by the Xinhua News Agency's monthly photojournalism magazine, began in August and lasted for more than a year. The discussion involved personnel from the Xinhua News Agency and its 21 branches, 27 newspapers from 21 provinces, regions, and cities, and 12 pictorials and magazines. The background was a mass discussion on some basic principles of photojournalism stirred up in the photojournalism field after the Rectification and Anti-Rightist campaigns. Although the discussion itself addressed the real needs of specific issues, in general, it had the “good intention” to match the general atmosphere of the Great Leap Forward and to promote the “Great Leap Forward in photojournalism.”40
Yet precisely because of Cartier-Bresson's arrival, the origin of this discussion became problematic. “Some comrades asked: when we discuss the issue of truthfulness in photojournalism, vehemently opposing the overuse of manipulation, arrangement, and processing, are we influenced by foreign countries, by Cartier-Bresson?”41 This question touched the nerves of the organizers of the truth discussion, and they did not dare to slacken. After all the discussions were over, in April 1960, a special “postscript” to the conclusion was issued in the name of the Xinhua News Agency to clarify the issue. The organizers did not answer this question directly, but rather in a vague and evasive way: “It would be untrue to deny the foreign influence at all; but it would also be fundamentally wrong to exaggerate it to the point of denying or ignoring the benefit of our discussion of the issue of truthfulness in photojournalism.”42 According to the organizers, the subjectivism and formalism in Chinese photojournalism undoubtedly were influenced by the bourgeois salon tradition. The arrangement, posing and manipulation in the art of photography is also a product of the salons in its history. What was deliberately ignored here is the prevalence of arrangement, posing, and manipulation in photojournalism for propagandic purposes during the war years and the period of socialist reforms.
The idea to “oppose manipulation, arrangement, and posing" and demand truth in photojournalism was also traced back to Shi Shaohua's article “On Photojournalism” published in 1953. The organizers of the discussion therefore deduced that the struggle against manipulation had begun five or six years before Cartier-Bresson's arrival in China. They stated:
Back then many of us did not even know that there was a Cartier-Bresson in the world. Therefore, it is obviously wrong to think that the struggle against manipulation in Chinese photojournalism in 1958-1959 was only due to the influence of foreign countries, Cartier-Bresson, and not due to the fact that the Rectification campaign and Anti-rightist struggle have raised our appreciation of photojournalism, and not due to our good intentions to strive for the best quality in photojournalism.43
The organizers’ political alertness is not hard to miss. How could a vigorous struggle against manipulation carried out by the photojournalism community be accidentally facilitated by a French foreigner whose name many people in our country didn’t even know?
Apparently, the organizers of the discussion had complex feelings towards Cartier-Bresson. The reputation and body of work of Cartier-Bresson could not be dismissed in one or two words. The organizers explained the reason for the “great appreciation of Cartier-Bresson by American imperialism” as follows:
Cartier-Bresson, as a bourgeois photographer, breaking away from the style of photography salons, reflects life directly with his photographs. In order to express his views and positions, he did not rely on photographic arrangement, processing, and manipulation, but the shots he directly picked from life. There are no artificial traces visible in his photographs therefore they are more effective in deceiving and paralyzing the reader.44
Flattery followed by condemning pronouncement. The transition between argument and conclusion is abrupt and lacks logical connection. Why does the last sentence seem to be a dumb afterthought? Could squeezing in the phrase “as a bourgeois photographer” adequately show the author’s position? Or was it simply because his second trip to China “made a despicable distortion of the Great Leap Forward and the People's Commune in China,” thus hurting “the feelings of the Chinese people?” In contrast to Cartier-Bresson's own words on his work, the above interpretation, despite the evaluative ending, is touching upon peripheries of Cartier-Bresson's theory on the “decisive moment.”
In a calm and conversational manner, and with an open mind for learning, the Chinese could have taken Cartier-Bresson's second visit as an opportunity to advance Chinese photography. In hindsight the visit could have pushed photography in mainland China forward by at least a few decades. If photos taken during Cartier-Bresson’s second visit had been those that seemed to “record the great spirit of the Chinese people to change the world” and had been generally accepted by the officials and the people of the mainland, then Cartier-Bresson could have become famous among Chinese photographers and become their friend decades earlier. His influence on photojournalism in mainland China could have been even greater. But the history of photography has never accepted conditional clauses. The truth of history is that Cartier-Bresson was treated as an enemy and an opponent, instead of a subject of study or research.
To oppose and defeat Cartier-Bresson in photojournalism, the old ways of subjectivism and formalism in photography won’t help. The deep selection that we propagated in the discussion of truth in photojournalism is a “key skill” we encourage journalists to practice. In essence, it is anything but copying Cartier-Bresson. One must not be self-abased, thinking that only foreign influences could help us recognize and grasp the essential characteristics of photography and apply them in practice.45
On August 19, 1960, the “Bourgeoisie of All Shades” exhibition (internal) was held in Beijing. The notes from Li Zhensheng (1940-2020), then a young journalist who later relocated to the United States and was best known for his photographs of the Cultural Revolution, recorded the “repudiation material,” the accusations made by the organizers of the exhibition against Cartier-Bresson:
Under the guise of "objective reflection of real life" and "objective truth", the "neo-realists" stressed the importance of recording reality in its natural form, without manipulation, arrangement and posing, capturing people unexpectedly in the scene, and no cutting or modification. Disguised as impartial, objective and truthful, their bourgeois stand, and views are in fact clear-cut. They always distort the reality of life according to the interests and demands of the bourgeoisie. They primarily expose the dark side of social life, and occasionally expose some darkness of bourgeois rule, in order to achieve the goal of "big help with small scolding". In most cases, however, their lenses are pointed at the progressive social life and working people. Like skilled detectives, they quickly catch the superficial, the isolated and the random to replace the major, the essential, and typical phenomena of universal significance in life. They distort and slander the latter to the utmost. Therefore, they are the most confusing, reactionary and dangerous of the modern bourgeois schools. The main figure of this school in France, Cartier-Bresson, distorted and viciously propagated the socialist construction in our country.
On July 10, 2003, Li Zhensheng visited the 93-year-old Cartier-Bresson when he went to the French town of Arles to attend a photography festival. When Li showed Cartier-Bresson the “repudiation materials” he kept from forty years ago, Cartier-Bresson almost shouted: “I believed in communism at that time. Didn't the Chinese people know I was a communist? I was really a member of the Communist Party! Even though I did not grab the Party card.” At the end, the old man muttered, “what on earth made people criticize one of their own!”
Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Jin Yongquan’s ground-breaking book Hongqi zhaoxiangguan: 1956–1959 nian zhongguo sheying zhengbian [Red Flag Studio: Debates on photography in China, 1956–1959] (Beijing: Jincheng chubanshe 2014). In this book, Jin explored primary materials, especially internal publications of the party state, of which the scholarly community was previously unaware. As many of these sources remain unavailable and inaccessible, his work is both an insightful historical analysis and a rich document that supports further exploration on photography, visual culture, and politics of socialist China. This translation made minor adjustments to the original Chinese texts for a better understanding by the readers of TAP. The records of Cartier-Bresson in the many original materials presented in this article are not merely understudied materials on the French photographer. Instead, they offer a rare glimpse of the process through which the state photography in China, as represented by the Chinese Photographers Association, approached ideas, styles, and persons from abroad. It is worth emphasizing the long quotations of Cartier-Bresson’s remarks in this essay were Chinese translations, which filtered Cartier-Bresson’s opinions through local interest, norms, and emphases. For the cover image of this article, we chose a photograph depicting fellow Chinese photographers who were working at the Shisanling Reservoir site, by Chen Bo, who photographed there both on his own and with Cartier-Bresson as his designated companion in 1958.
Notes
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Note by translator: Here the author is quoting a line from “My Motherland,” an exceedingly popular soundtrack of the 1956 film Shang gan ling. The next line in the lyric is “Enemies will be met with shotguns.”
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Wang Ningsheng, “Shitan sheying suxie,” Xinwen sheying, no. 12 (1957): 67–68.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The People of Moscow (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955).
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
For example, “Pu-le-song,” “Bu-le-song,” “Bo-luo-song,” “Bu-lie-sen,” and “Bu-le-sen.”
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Note by editor: The last title is clearly a mistake. The CPA conflated two titles—Les Danses à Bali (1954) and The Europeans (1955)—into one.
Bo Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang: sui faguo sheyingjia Pulesong qu shisanling gongdi sheying jianji,” Zhongguo sheying, no. 10 (2004): 48. The article was originally published in a 1958 issue of Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang,” 48.
Sheying yewu, no. 11 (1956): 21.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang,” 48.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang”, 48.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang”, 48.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang”, 48.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang”, 48.
Chen, “Yitian de yinxiang”, 48.
“He faguo sheyingjia Kajier.Bulesen zuotan sheying yishu zhaiyao,” Xinwen sheying, no. 8 (1958): 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
“He faguo sheyingjia,” 55.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun, (October 30, 1958): 21.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, ed., “Guanyu xinwen sheying zhenshixing wenti taolun de zongjiexing yijian（December 1959）,” in Xinhuashe wenjian ziliao xuanbian, vol. 4 (1957-1961) (Beijing: Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, 1984), 412.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun, (June 23, 1959), 20.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun, (June 23, 1959), 20.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun (July 10, 1958): 23.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun, (June 23, 1959), 20.
Zhongguo sheying xuehui tongxun, (June 23, 1959), 20.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, ed., “Guanyu xinwen sheying zhenshixing”, 412.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, ed., “Guanyu xinwen sheying zhenshixing wenti taolun de zongjiexing yijian. Houji（April 1960）,” in Xinhuashe wenjian ziliao xuanbian, vol. 4 (1957-1961) (Beijing: Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, 1984), 455.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, “Houji”, 458.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, “Houji”, 455.
Xinhuashe xinwen yanjiusuo, “Houji”, 456.
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