PHOTOGRAPHY AND IDEOLOGY IN REVOLUTIONARY CHINA:A CRITICAL REVIEW

Written by HUANG JIAN

PHOTOGRAPHY AND IDEOLOGY IN REVOLUTIONARY CHINA:
A CRITICAL REVIEW

HUANG JIAN

HUAZHONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form.

Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art, Selected works of Mao Tse-Tung, 1942

In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways.

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2007, 175

Abstract: This article addresses the discursive disciplining of photography and film production and reception in China during the revolutionary era after 1949. By critically comparing works produced locally by Chinese photographers and Antonioni’s documentary film Chung-Kuo it will be argued not only that visual culture in China during the revolutionary period was not only unrealistic in its depiction of life and narrowly conceived in terms of its aesthetics, but that it also failed to signify the diversity of social existence and a democratization of social consciousness.

Keywords: Lei Feng, photography, documentary, Chinese Communist Party Antonioni socialist realism

About the Author: Huang Jian is a PhD candidate in sociology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. His main research interests include visual culture in Cultural Revolution, contemporary ideology and the construction of revolutionary ideology in China. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Professor Qiuyun Sun, Melissa Wang, Li Zhao, Yunting Ju and Lifen Wang for their helpful comments and assistances on the earlier draft. I also thank Professor Paul Gladston for his excellent editorial work on the revised version of this article.

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