Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Volume 2)

by Jack Birns (Photographer), Orville Schell (Foreword), Carolyn Wakeman (Editor)

Shipping out to China in December 1947 with three ten-year-old German cameras and a plum assignment from Life magazine, Jack Birns was fulfilling a boyhood dream. The reality was something refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests photographed in difficult and often dangerous circumstances amidst the poverty, corruption, and chaos of an expanding civil war. By then the ruling Nationalist Party had been battling the Communist threat for more than two decades, and Birns focused his camera on the human drama unfolding as war pressed ever closer to the country's financial, cultural, and commercial capital. His effort to show China's misery up close ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life' s archives. Printed here for the first time, they offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.

Seen through the lens of hindsight, Birns's photographs give us a sense not only of what China was like more than fifty years ago, but also of why the warfare, weariness, and desperation of the time proved such fertile soil for communist revolution. Today these everyday scenes of ordinary people—pedicab drivers, street vendors, bar girls, police, politicians, prisoners—tell a story of national resilience and dignity in the midst of enveloping poverty, repression, and fear. Birns's stark black and white photographs capture the dramatic end of an era, but they also look forward, letting us glimpse how Shanghai's past prefigures the city's commercial and cultural revival in the 1990s.

Genres: China, Photography, Asia

144 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2003

Reviews

[Zeitgeist · Rating 4 out of 5]

沒有人能夠想到，已經改革開放三十八年的上海不僅沒有重回曾經的「遠東第一大都市」的地位，反而在二零二二年再次回到一九四九年的命運：從國際經濟金融中心到中共政治革命運動橋頭堡。想來，國際化和市場經濟本身就為秦制極權社會所不容吧。

[Chunyang Ding · Rating 2 out of 5]

The photos are haunting. The narrative through the captions are less so.