Introduction

This essay will discuss the historical and political significance of documentary photography in China and the role of the camera in defining the social and political condition. Specifically, this essay will mainly argue the significance of documentary photography as eyewitness evidence and political attitude under the Chinese government’s control over public opinion and freedom of media. This essay will use examples from photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Stuart Franklin and Ai Weiwei to support the argument.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French humanist photographer who viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. During Cartier-Bresson’s embryonic career as a photojournalist, it was a turning point when one of the most dominant American magazines Life asked him to go to China for working on a story entitled The Last Time We Saw Peiping. After twelve days of working in Peking, he left when the Communist forces arrived, and he took his most famous photograph Gold Rush by chance in Shanghai. He eventually stayed and took photographs of Mainland China for nearly ten months (from 1 December 1948 to 23 September 1949).

Gold Rush in Shanghai was documented on 23 December 1948 when the financial decrees issued by the Kuomintang government from Nanking on 19 August 1948 forbade the keeping of silver, gold or foreign currency, and it was compulsory to exchange these for gold yuan notes (金圓券 jinyuan juan), index-linked to gold. On 15 November, the government announced a rule of gold purchase, which limited the amount that could be exchanged (1 兩 liang for 37.5 g every three months), upon written request to the bank. The panic spread to Shanghai, as tens of thousands were waiting outside of the bank. According to Shun Pao newspaper, the crush of people resulted in seven deaths and fifty wounded, and at 5 p.m. on 23 December, the banks announced it would no longer sell gold. This chaotic scene was recorded by Cartier-Bresson’s decisive movement of his shutter to demonstrate the insane behaviour of the Chinese, its shallow depth of field depicted a compressed queue that expressed a wide range of emotions through people’s facial expression (desperation, anger, panic and even laughter) and gazes. Douglas Smith argued that although Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are usually associated with a lack of formal precision, the uneven focus and blurred appearance of numbers of figures convey immediacy and instability. The decisiveness of a moment is not one of formal equilibrium but derives instead from the contextualising caption. In order to capture magnificent documentary photographs in 1948 China’s social condition was difficult for Cartier-Bresson, he recounted that:

I felt that looking from a window in a distance was not right and a little sadistic, so I went down to force my way out. People around me kept fumbling in my pockets. I only got annoyed when they asked me the price of my camera, computing if it was worth the trouble to steal.

The challenging condition was a significant matter of the Gold Rush series, Cartier-Bresson witnessed this historical event through his rangefinder and captured a meaningful photograph as evidence.

In contrast, the political demonstration On Nanking Road was a group-in-fusion photograph by Cartier-Bresson. It displays a scene of the 6 July 1949 parades in Shanghai where the dynamic gathering of the people united to pursue a common goal, as in political agitation. The anniversary of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937) was on 7 July, which was later to encourage foreign intervention in China, particularly by America. The anniversary parade of 7 July to celebrate the establishment of the new regime took place on 6 July 1949 due to the fear of the Kuomintang bombardments. The diagonal composition of On Nanking Road revealed the courteous trade union procession was moving up the avenue in front of the racetrack, while the People’s Liberation Army was moving the opposite way. In the respect of this photograph, Smith argues that it provided not only an illustration but also an impetus for Sartre’s emergent demographic thought. Mao Zedong always believed in the slogan “Many men provide great strength (人多力量大 renduo liliangda)”, the enormous crowd provided a convulsing visual experience to express people’s unity. Moreover, a portrait of Mao appeared in the centre of the composition, also in between the crowds, which embodied the political position of Mao and his importance in the hearts of the people.

Under Mao’s control, policies in Chinese education have undergone major shifts since 1949 in response to the general swings in Chinese ideological debates and the political fortunes of different leaders and factions. Children studied in poor conditions, especially in early education. Cartier-Bresson has proven this situation by capturing a photo of children in school. Under a portrait of Mao, a slogan written in the centre of the composition: “Educate yourself to become a cultivated worker with a sense of socialism (培養自己成為有社會主義覺悟，有文化的勞動者 peiyangziji chengweiyou shehuizhuyijuewu, youwenhuade laodongzhe).” The two flags of China and the slogan poster demonstrated that Students at a young age were forced to study Mao’s ideologies and emphasised nationalism. Chinese Communist Party often glorified the phrase: “Start from the baby (從娃娃抓起 cong wawa zhuaqi)”, as children could be easily politically brainwashed. Furthermore, children were overcrowded on a bench, some of them were reading comic books (小兒書 xiaoershu), and others were dazing. Cartier-Bresson used his camera as a medium once again to verify the political influence of the Chinese.

Stuart Franklin

Stuart Franklin was another photographer who captured historically significant evidence of China. Franklin photographed the uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he shot his most iconic and famous photograph Tank Man. The Tiananmen Square protests were precipitated by the death of Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989 along with the rapid economic development. It was student-led demonstrations that occupied the public square for the main goals of ending the corruption within the Communist Party, as well as democratic reforms, freedom of speech and freedom of association. The person who appears in the Tank Man photograph was trying to stop the column of T59 tanks in Tiananmen Square. Franklin thought the Tiananmen Square event was unusual because he considered it a homogenous and cohesive society, something must be badly wrong. He shot the Tank Man to indicate this unknown hero expressed Chinese people’s attitudes and spirit toward power and wrongness. Franklin believed that his camera played a role of a mechanism for adventure, and his adventurous journey happened the night before he took the Tank Man. The lobby of the hotel was taken over by the Chinese internal security, they were searching for cameras and films, therefore the next day, Franklin found a balcony in the hotel where he viewed the movement of the tanks coming out of Tiananmen Square. The unexpected invasion of the Chinese securities exacerbated the significance of the photograph in terms of the theme of “freedom”. Although the Tank Man was a well-known masterpiece, Franklin considered it was not a powerful photograph, as he believed in the quote by Robert Capa “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”, if he could photograph from a closer distance, the Tank Man might be irreplaceable. The Tank Man image and the historical event of Tiananmen Square 1989 have been banned in China, up to the present day. This action by the Chinese government strongly emphasised the historical and political significance of this photograph, and the story of the tank man will always be remembered and commemorated.

Even though Franklin’s Tank Man was an epic and cannot be replaced, his photographs taken before 4 June 1989 were also meaningful to the Tiananmen Square Incident. A photograph of medics at Chang’an Avenue was spectacular with detailed compositions. Chang’an Avenue was a major thoroughfare in Beijing, and ironically the literal meaning of the avenue was “Eternal Peace Avenue”. The detailed compositions established historical components of the event: names of injured protesters were displaying at the top left corner of the composition (Hu Xiao 胡曉, Ren Song 任嵩, among many others), the male medic drinking Beijing local sparkling orange juice (北冰洋 beibingyang) and the blue banner “the fourth dare-to-die team” (第四個敢死隊 disige gansidui) next to the medic. Both medics looked exhausted in the photograph but presented hopefulness in their gaze. All these elements allow the photograph to give an expression of the setting, situation, and mental state of the protesters during this great movement.

Goddess of Democracy was another historically significant photograph that embodied the determination of the protesters. The design of the statue was based on a renowned Soviet sculpture by Vera Mukhina A Worker and Collective Farm Woman and the goddess brandishes a torch instead of a sickle. The ten-meter Styrofoam statue was completed only in three days by fifteen students, and it was a direct challenge to the state’s monopoly over the iconography of Tiananmen Square. The persistent spirit of the students was unstoppable, and they would fight for their demands at all costs. Unfortunately, Goddess of Democracy as the perfect symbol for China’s pro-democracy protesters was also the movement’s angel of death. As the statue was demolished by a tank on 4 June 1989, the pursuit of democracy and freedom came to an end in China. Under the censorship of the protest by the Communist Party of China, a large number of the Mainland Chinese people have no recognition of these photographs by Franklin, and many of them chose to not believe it, and others were simply afraid to say. Despite the forbiddance of the 1989 Democracy Movement in China, Franklin revealed the truth of this historical event by publishing his photographic films in Tiananmen Square.

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist and political activist who used photography as an ideological instrument to criticise the ugly facts of the Chinese Communist Party and emerged his political attitude. Ai had no illusion with China, he believed that there was still a strong struggle, against the ideology. And he considered the Communist Party of China had not changed in regard to censorship, there was still no freedom of speech. Freedom is an indispensable part of an artist, and apparently, Ai was not eligible to have it in China. Ai was tracked by the undercover cops ordered by the Chinese government and monitored through security cameras installed outside of his place of residence and work. Although Ai was pessimistic about the change of ideology in China in the foreseeable future, he still attempted to support China by excoriating the Communist Part of China. 1989 was a crackdown for the students in Tiananmen Square, in order to remind and commemorate the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, Ai captured a photograph of his later wife Lu Qing, standing in front of Tiananmen surrounded by a thick crowd, with her skirt lifted to reveal her bare legs and bikini underwear. This action was controversial and adventurous, as the People’s Liberation Army guards were patrolling behind Lu. Ai’s fearless selection of the subject matter allowed his photographs to provoke public opinion and discussion in Mainland China and exposed his political views.

A Study of Perspective is a series of photographs, which Ai spent about 8 years (1995-2003) travelling around the world and capturing the world’s most well-known monuments (including Tiananmen Square, Eiffel Tower and The White House, among many others) with himself holding up his own middle finger, a colloquial gesture of “giving the finger” to them. And the most iconic piece in this series was the black-and-white version of Tiananmen. The use of performance gestures was significant in order to produce a not-subtle criticism of the Chinese government, as a gesture in a photograph was a historically non-verbal technique of communicating his ideals and ideologies. Ai’s non-verbal language was straightforward and politically inspirational to emerge his emotions and perspectives about government corruption.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn was another performance by Ai which provoked consternation ahead of applause. Ai photographed three black and white motion images to record his action of smashing an ancient cultural artifact in order to criticise the Chinese Communist Party for its position in the world economy and its tradition of destroying its own culture, moreover, it implied the message of resistance and revolution. Ai was grown up under Mao’s instruction that people can only establish a new world if they destroy the old one, and Ai ironically mentioned that he was well-schooled in the concept of destroying the old to contribute to the new. Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn was an essential exclamation in which he challenged the government and Mao’s ideology. Arguably, Ai’s photography was a representation of the interdependent relationship between art and policies. Timothy Lukes argued that “art sets the agenda for politics and politics seeks to support, therefore willing to falsify the depiction of outcomes for the sake of expediency and power.” Under political pressure from the Chinese Communist Party, Ai was not suited to being a Chinese contemporary artist who reside in China. Despite the censorship of Ai in China and his controversial photographs, his prints demonstrated his political opinion and attitude.

Conclusion

In conclusion, China has been a blockade nation that forbids sensitive information and images for its governance. According to the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Stuart Franklin and Ai Weiwei, the camera played an essential role in defining China's political and social condition, also representing one’s political opinion. Additionally, documentary photography was historically significant as it can be regarded as the witness of historical events in China.

Martin Ho, May 2021