In early 1948, Cartier-Bresson was in India taking photographs of Gandhi less than two hours before the Indian leader’s assassination. His photos of Gandhi’s final hours and funeral, when published in LIFE magazine and other pictorial glossies around the world, were part of his ascension to the rank of celebrity photojournalist. Later that year, he traveled to China to photograph what were expected to be the final days of the Chinese Civil War. He ended up staying for ten months and capturing the pivotal moments of China’s modern historical schism: Mao’s Communists established the People’s Republic of China, and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists were driven from the mainland to Taiwan.
Cartier-Bresson snapped more than 5000 images on this tour, of which 500 were circulated by Magnum Photos. Before 2019, their last major public airing came in 1954, when 144 images were published in the book D’une Chine à l’autre.
The rather incredible thing about the photographic exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: China, 1948-1949 / 1958 is that it was scheduled to tour both Taipei and Beijing after opening at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris in late 2019. Here is perhaps the most distinguished photographic record of the moment China broke in two—a divisive moment that still bears the potential to renew itself with great violence—and it was planned for exhibition to two populations with almost completely opposite views of that history.
Following Cartier-Bresson’s 1949 departure from China, the Chinese Civil War reached a rather farcical détente, with a hundred miles of ocean separating the two armies. Both sides claimed sovereignty over the other, with enshrined documents “proving” their claims, and gradually transferred the battlefield to the realm of propaganda and international diplomacy. Seventy years later, there they still sit, facing each other and contesting “historical truth.”
Yet in a very real way, the Taiwan-China conflict is still volatile. Recent months have seen some of the highest cross-strait military tensions in recent memory, with jet fighters from both sides and the US Navy contesting the airspace and sea lanes of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Beijing threatens to take Taiwan, if necessary, in a brutal bloodbath. And Taiwan—which has for practical purposes shelved its claim to the Chinese mainland but has yet to remove it from its constitution and still officially calls itself the Republic of China—holds fast to its democracy and self-rule.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: China did, in fact, make it to Taiwan, where it was shown at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum from June to November 2020. Additional photographs were added, with 170 displayed in Taipei compared to 154 in Paris. At the opening, Taipei museum director Lin Ping declared, “The exhibition came to Taiwan sixty years too late.”
One is no longer surprised to find such a progressive attitude in Asia’s most progressive country, but even fifteen or twenty years ago—when every presidential election was viewed as a referendum on independence versus unification with China, and international observers described the emergence of a new “Taiwanese identity”—the exhibition would likely have been a political landmine.
The Beijing exhibition, scheduled for early 2021, was however canceled due to COVID. It was to be hosted at the Tsinghua University Art Museum. The planning process for the exhibition took more than three years, so permissions and agreements in China at some significant level must have been obtained. A request for more information from the curators has not been returned.
The exhibition was conceived and created in Paris—at a critical distance from its Asian subjects, one might say, but also at the heart of the Cartier-Bresson archive—by French and Taiwanese curators Michel Frizot and Su Ying-Lung (蘇盈龍). It faithfully traces Cartier-Bresson’s travels through China, beginning with two weeks in Beijing in December 1948. The city is about to fall to the Communists, and the Nationalist army is in retreat.
From there, Cartier-Bresson returns to the Nationalist stronghold of Shanghai and makes a base for himself. He attempts to embed with the Communists in Qingdao but is detained and not allowed to take photographs. Upon release, he makes a detour to shoot in peaceful, Nationalist-held Hangzhou.
He doesn’t return to a conflict zone until April, when he photographs the fall of the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. At the end of May, he is back in Shanghai when the city finally falls to the Communists. He stays there until the Communists eventually allow foreign nationals to evacuate China on September 23, 1949.
Cartier-Bresson did not return to China again until 1958, when he was invited to photograph the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. During that trip, he also chanced to glimpse the backyard furnaces and communal construction projects of the Great Leap Forward.
For the recent exhibition, original photographs were counterposed with magazine spreads from LIFE, Paris Match, and other major illustrated news magazines of the day. Not only could one view the images, but also the process of how they were engaged in the production of knowledge for a Western audience. One cannot overstate their importance to how the world saw China in the 1950s.
Viewed on their own, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs—all high-contrast black-and-white images shot with a handheld Leica—are humanistic and poetic. Like Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the American Great Depression, they prefer common men and women to the political giants of the day. They show the impoverished, refugees, scholars, and street merchants. Nationalist leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, appears only through his likeness in the display of a Shanghai portrait studio. Then months later, the portrait sellers replace Chiang’s images with pictures of Mao.
As for the capturing of historical moments, these include Communist troops entering Nanjing, the final session of the Nationalist Parliament, Nationalist troops evacuating from Nanjing and Shanghai, and punters in a mad scrum trying to exchange soon-to-be-worthless banknotes for gold. There are no battle scenes. At best, we get troop movements.
The photographs themselves appear largely apolitical, and, at least at the start of the project, Cartier-Bresson was able to project this equivocating attitude into the Western media. In a LIFE photo essay from Beijing, just as the city was about to be taken by the Communists in December 1948, the headline reads, “City Finds Serenity in Birds and Boxing,” which is exactly what Cartier-Bresson’s photos show. In the accompanying text, Cartier-Bresson himself observed, “The course of history does not seem to interrupt a way of life.”
But then, two weeks later, LIFE changed its tune in another of his photo essays titled “Red Advance Brings Shanghai Panic.” His photographs could not remain apolitical for long.
One can’t help but wonder how such an exhibition would have been received in Beijing. It’s not difficult to imagine the impositions of government censors. I cannot help but think of other cultural events, such as the Beijing Independent Film Festival, which has been heroically organized, scheduled, and then disrupted or shut down by the authorities nearly every year of its existence. But on the other hand, the basic facts of this history are now more or less accepted by Beijing.
Also, Cartier-Bresson was also a communist sympathizer. On his second visit to China in 1958, he was invited by the Communist regime and was mostly embedded with it on a guided tour of the glories of real, living socialism. His photographs, in themselves, do not present a critique of the Chinese Communist Party.
In terms of China’s current realpolitik, I would also add that a considerable degree of self-expression is allowed, more than Western media generally give credit for. Censorship is indeed widespread but typically applied to certain forbidden topics and only when those become widely discussed. These practical realities are well understood by China’s creative communities, from contemporary artists to punk rockers, who toe an invisible line and frequently push in unexpected directions.
Chinese cultural workers and academics are perhaps some of the best in the world at feigning innocence and ignorance. Proposing information from an international source and refusing to interpret it, presenting it only in its blandest factuality, is a common technique. If the censors react, they simply delete, retract, or cancel. Never propose information as your own opinion or view. This is how expressive communities in China operate and survive.
The environment is restrictive, but it also has its free zones. The Ai Weiweis are rare, and while the risk of detention, torture, or banishment is real, most know how to stay out of trouble. And yet, one of the most sensitive topics to the Chinese government is Taiwan. It would have been fascinating to see how this exhibition was received or banned.
One powerful question raised by this exhibition—and specifically by the return of these old photographs to the physical sites of China’s civil war—is how long it takes for old wounds to heal. The youngest generation that still remembers China before 1949 is now around eighty years old. Is there a certain passage of time that would allow a contentious history to return to the realm of objective facts?
Susan Sontag once took Cartier-Bresson to task in her seminal collection of essays On Photography for being too impartial and for ignoring his images' political implications. “When Cartier-Bresson goes to China,” she wrote, “he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.” Photography, she argued, “transforms reality into a tautology.”
Sontag was writing in the mid-1970s, when photojournalists were widely regarded as heroes of photographic truth, and documentary filmmakers had recently developed the techniques associated with cinéma vérité. Photography with a handheld 35mm camera was becoming established as the newest and best technology for showing “direct truth.” But Sontag believed that photographs, like any other sign, were devious and manipulable.
“A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen,” she wrote. “As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use—so for each photograph.”
In principle, Cartier-Bresson seemed to agree with her. “Facts are not interesting,” he once famously said. “It’s the point of view on facts which is important.”
Understanding the nature of images and their potential for politicization, the curators of Henri Cartier-Bresson: China took great pains to situate their scholarship on the edge of bland factuality. It is potentially China-safe, while at the same time palatable to Western audiences. The texts accompanying the images are incontestable and no longer controversial: armies advanced, clashed, or retreated; governments made declarations; and Cartier-Bresson the man buzzed around this political panorama like a fly on the wall.
Taiwan’s media assiduously avoided politics in their reporting on the exhibition. Some coverage looked at the emotional reactions of third-generation Taiwanese, who, in Cartier-Bresson’s pictures, saw for the first time the harsh realities endured by grandparents who came to Taiwan as refugees. More typical were safe statements like this one from the Chinese-language newspaper the United Daily News:
“The documents of the developments of Asia’s modern history are for the first time given their most complete public exhibition through the photographs of an internationally famous artist.”
There is no explication of that history. One can also note the appeal to authority. The truth of these photographs is valid, the newspaper seems to say, because they were produced by a famous foreign artist. In Taiwan, there was no outcry, no controversy.
When I raised the question of how much time it takes to heal old wounds with a press officer at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, she replied, “The exhibition is possible now not because the wounds of history have been healed, but because of the encounter of these two researchers”—Frizot and Su. Her answer is again a retreat into bland factuality, what Chinese might refer to as “the middle way.”
While Sontag denied photographs the power of objective truth-telling, she avowed that one thing was certain: their meanings will change over time. “The context which shapes whatever immediate—in particular, political—uses the photograph may have is inevitably succeeded by contexts in which such uses are weakened and become progressively less relevant,” she wrote.
What was the original meaning of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of China? A Communist victory? A Nationalist defeat? Perhaps those meanings have faded with the years, and the ability to exhibit them, at least in Taiwan, is the sign of a society no longer holding a grudge. In a more general sense, we may also see these photos as universal images of human hardship and struggle, and as such, less exclusively tied to political events.
Either way, their exhibition and renewed public scrutiny seem a way forward from an historical impasse, a way of accepting historical facts—blunted by time, perhaps, and on the authority of a foreign expert—as a step toward moving on.
