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Chinese Photography Today
| Article
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20523 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
1,852 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Photographers have opened our eyes to modern China. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the treaty settlements of 1860 allowed Westerners to travel more freely through the country, and Western photographers carted their boxy equipment afield. Those such as Feli Beato and John Thomson brought back startling pictures of the elaborately ritualized Manchu court, of ornate palaces and manicured gardens, of street scenes and ordinary people, of trade and commerce. Previously, these had been described in writing or in prints, but never before had they been seen in such graphic, realistic detail. For the folks back home in Europe and the United States, these photographs must have confirmed the fabled "exoticism" of the East.
Early in this century, the American scholar Sidney Gamble carted around a "big, ungainly camera" on his long sojourns in China. For his 1921 book Peking: A Social Survey, he included fifty photographs, which documented everything from the appalling poverty of street beggars to hundreds of students gathered for a protest. And later, as photographs became an important feature of news magazines, photojournalists brought back pictures of a nation ravaged by long years of calamity, war, and revolution.
More recently, after the reopening of China after the Cultural Revolution (1966--1976), photographers such as Eve Arnold and Marc Riboud brought back lush color images of epic terrain in remote hinterlands, fascinating portraits of individuals, both young and old, and scenes of masses of people bicycling down city boulevards or doing t'ai chi exercises in public parks. Published in major magazines such as Life or National Geographic and in coffee table books, these pictures showed us once again the human China, the picturesque China, not just the China of gritty news service stories depicting the latest political rally.
But we rarely get to see art photography by the Chinese themselves. As a matter of fact, it difficult to find any books in this country of Chinese photography.
This year a Chinese delegation assembled 150 works by photographers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan for a tour to four American cities. The Exhibition of Chinese Photographic Arts made stops in New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, with a showing next year in Los Angeles.
Heading the delegation that traveled with the show was Yang Shaoming, president of the China Society of Contemporary Photography as well as vice
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