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Over one hundred original prints recount the "last days of Beijing" before communism and document the "great leap forward" of Mao Zedong's China - Photo gallery

China by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Milan, February 17 2022 – From 18 February to 3 July 2022, the exhibition "Henri Cartier-Bresson. China 1948-49 | 1958" arrives in Italy for the first time, in the spaces of Mudec photo, a solo exhibition linked to two Chinese reportages for which the great photographer he is remembered as the absolute master of the so-called "decisive moment".

The exhibition, promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture, produced by 24 Ore Cultura - Gruppo 24 Ore and created thanks to the collaboration of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, brings together an exceptional corpus of photographs and archive documents by the French photojournalist: over 100 original prints along with period magazine publications, documents and letters from the HCB Foundation collection.

The itinerary, curated by Michel Frizot and Ying-Lung Su, recounts two key moments in the history of China: the fall of the Kuomintang and the establishment of the communist regime (1948-1949) and Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" (1958).

An important moment in the history of world photojournalism, experienced through the personal approach of Cartier-Bresson, who was the first to highlight - through the eye of his lens - important themes of change in contemporary Chinese history, managing to present to the Western world also aspects kept hidden by regime propaganda, such as the exploitation of human resources and the omnipresence of militias.

In fact, on November 25, 1948, the magazine "Life" commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to write a report on the "last days of Beijing" before the arrival of Mao's troops. The stay, expected to last two weeks, will last ten months, mainly in the Shanghai area.

Cartier-Bresson will document the fall of Nanjing, governed by the Kuomintang, and will then find himself forced to remain for four months in Shanghai, controlled by the Communist Party, finally leaving the country a few days before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China (1 October 1949 ).

As the months passed, his story of the "traditional" Chinese lifestyle and the establishment of a new regime (Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai), created with total freedom of action, enjoyed great success in the pages of "Life " and the major other international news magazines (including the newly founded "Paris Match").

Cartier-Bresson's long stay in China marks a turning point in the history of photojournalism: the Magnum photos agency had been founded (with the participation of Cartier-Bresson himself) eighteen months earlier in New York and Chinese reportage proposed a new style, less tied to events, more poetic and detached, attentive both to the subjects portrayed and to the formal balance of the composition. Many of these images are still among the most famous in the history of photography (for example, the Gold Rush in Shanghai).

Starting from the 1948s, following "China 49-1952", Cartier-Bresson became one of the major names of reference for the "new" photojournalism and, in general, for the renewal of photography. The volumes "The decisive moment" (Verve, 1954) and "D'une Chine à l'autre" (Delpire, XNUMX), with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, confirm this.

In 1958, close to the tenth anniversary of that first reportage, Cartier-Bresson set off again, this time in a completely different situation: for four months, accompanied by a guide, he traveled thousands of kilometers in China to visit selected places , steelworks complexes, large dams under construction, oil wells, "model" rural towns on the trail of the "Great Leap Forward" to document the results of the Revolution and the forced industrialization of rural regions.

Of all this, however, he also manages to show the less positive aspects: the exploitation of human labor, military control, the omnipresence of propaganda. Once again, the reportage "China 1958" will enjoy great editorial success, with publications scheduled on an international scale, during the first week of January 1959. Supported by the reputation of the author and the competence of Magnum, it will mark the image of China in the West. Mao's China until the XNUMXs.

The volume " is available in the exhibition bookshopHenri Cartier-Bresson. China 1948-49 | 1958", published by 24 Ore Cultura. Tickets: entry €12, concessions €10.