These kinds of images provide a different window on what life for some people. We often hear of people's lives that have been destroyed by political oppression, but daily life was more nuanced. Political campaigns ran through people's lives, but they also engaged in more mundane activities, such as taking their children to the park, escorting children to school, going to the movies or get married.
Some researchers question whether it is appropriate to call the Maoist period "totalitarian." What do you think?
I tend not to use the word totalitarianism. It is one of those words, like fascism, which seems to have much explanatory power, but can easily conceal as much as it reveals, especially since it tends to have a strong moral content and is frequently deployed to discredit all you're talking about. about
how many photos are government propaganda and how many personal photos ?
It is difficult to say, because they come from other blogs that do not always cite their sources. Where you get a good amount of personal photos are sent down youth. A significant number have cameras with them and took pictures of their experiences. A number of them do not seem to be used for propaganda purposes, like a guy in sunglasses. Then you have pictures of large cities and family photos that do not seem to serve Communist purposes. There are also a whole kind of pictures by foreign journalists, who have a different aesthetic.
Is there a risk that the official photos show Potemkinesque China?
Yes, the site certainly has Potemkin images, which, like the legendary Soviet town depict an ideal vision of socialist life where happiness is clearly normative emotion. In these images, photographers have clearly settled people around with a camera and be asked to smile or airbrush joy on their faces, pretending that people in China had a unique emotional experience of socialism - a state of almost constant joy to how their every action has made a contribution, no matter how small, worldwide triumph of socialism and capitalism, the decline in the dustbin of history.
However, it is important to remember that photographic manipulation is not unique to Maoist China. That said, the scale of the issues of photographic manipulation, like the existence of government rules, formal or informal, regarding such activities are acceptable for recording and publicly broadcast.
Although these rules are important, it is also noted that cultural workers in Maoist China are not always acted in fear or seek to comply with the orders of the party. Memoirs show that media personnel believed that photography could advance the socialist cause by describing China not as it really was, but as it could be at its best. cultural producers were also not all of one mind. In the 1950s, debates were held on the merits of changing the pictures.
media from local and central government also had different pressures, aspirations and resources. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, it was possible to take a shirtless selfie, which, although it paid tribute to the self-confidence, muscular prospective military and industrial hero of the day, the authorities would nevertheless probably labeled as against revolutionary.
With the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution many new books out. Traditionally, in the West, many of these books were the memories of the victims. Is this your blog to be a fix?
The project aims to build a visual archive of the widest range of experience as possible. I sometimes do not give titles of images that refer to campaigns like the Cultural Revolution, because there is such a strong tendency for people to think of Maoist China in terms of major political campaigns. The campaigns are not the only way people have seen or remember the past.
That said, the blog has a number of images of iconic practices Cultural Revolution, such as Mao receiving the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, mass criticism sessions, people ritually Mao reports each morning young children posing with guns and red reading Little red guards, looting a church and rename the streets to make them revolutionary. But there also has pictures of lesser-known activities, such as people who go to the market, Zhou Enlai attend a funeral, the students practicing martial arts, a parade for the dead Red Guard portraits of accused protests or Maoist inspired Hong Kong.
The blog also several images of the Great Leap Forward, from ovens to the iconic rear and public canteens much less leading practices in the public memory, such as ovens in the back in the parade on Tiananmen square, Hong Kong refugees from famine, ceremonies marking industrial progress, cultural shows, diplomatic visits, artists at work, a British newsreel about shortages "strange" food, art courtyard of the furnace, Mao take a bath at the conference where he ignored the criticism of the Great Leap and the CIA film, generally gives a fairly positive image.
findingA particularly surprising is this amazing painting. It gives a rather different representation of workers building a new road of contemporary propaganda, in which a common theme has been the construction of a road to socialism. In this particular table, there is no clear message. There is no leader. There is no glory. There is even a road. If this is propaganda, it is a peculiar kind.
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