China in photo books

LONDON — In 1971, Lin Biao, Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China, was killed in a plane crash somewhere in Mongolia. Lin, once Mao Zedong’s closest comrade and his presumptive successor, had fallen from grace in the months before his death.

The following year, when news of the crash was finally announced, the Party’s line was clear: Lin was to be written out of history. Pages of his writings were torn from books and badges that showed his face were confiscated and destroyed.

When Ruben Lundgren, one of the co-curators of The Chinese Photobook exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, was scouring the flea markets of Beijing, he came across dozens of defaced copies of one particular book, Chairman Mao Is The Red Sun In Our Hearts. Using whatever came to hand — scissors or black pen or glued-on bits of paper — people had excised the image of Lin Biao from their copies.

“If you find this book in a market that still has Lin Biao in, you pay a good price for it,” said Lundgren. “That’s what all the dealers know. It’s more rare. They are amazed that we are interested to buy these (altered) copies. They’re cheap. They don’t see why you’d pay for a damaged copy.”

Lundgren has had the help, both curatorial and financial, of Martin Parr, the photographer who has almost single-handedly popularised the idea of the photobook as a medium via his three-volume history of the form. He was also aided by his London-based accomplice Thijs Groot Wassink, and between them the three have collected some 1,000 volumes which shed light on the past 100-or-so years of Chinese history.

From the early 20th century, there are books produced by Western visitors to China, often markedly Orientalist in design and subject matter. There are also the early flowerings of Chinese artistic photography, as seen in the painterly work of Lang Jingshan.

The history of Chinese photography diverges sharply from that of the West with the coming of Mao. Images from the Mao years seem familiar to Western eyes. It’s easy to gobble up these kitsch, brightly coloured bonbons, forgetting for a moment the deaths of millions under the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

In China, they turn people queasy. An alternate version of the show has gone up in Beijing and Lundgren says that he expects the section devoted to the Mao years to turn Chinese viewers off. There, the history is much closer and the response more deeply felt.

“When the younger generation see anything with Mao on it, they run away,” he said. “The first thing they’re gonna say is, ‘Oh, foreigners love this’. But perhaps it’s a good thing for foreigners to look at this part of their history. For Chinese photographers, it’s very hard to judge these pictures as having any qualities at all. If you see them as reflecting a fake history, how can you appreciate them?”

By now Lundgren, a conspicuously tall, shaven-headed Dutchman, is a familiar sight at Beijing’s book markets. He’s taken increasingly to buying books online, though, guided by the principles of strong photography, design and historical significance.

There are oddities, too. A book which solely features pictures of tongues — used as an aid to practitioners of traditional medicine — sits beside an ostensibly “scientific” publication on the “hairy people of China”.

The collection was initially built up fairly haphazardly — “no system to it,” said Lundgren, “a good book is a good book” — but when chronological gaps became apparent, the pair would change their focus accordingly. Theirs will be the first major survey of Chinese photobooks to be published.

“Neither of us ever felt like we were experts on this subject,” said Wassink. “But when people around you know less than you do…”

“…Suddenly you’re an expert!” said Lundgren. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH