Chinese Photobook

Strange exhibition at the Photographers Gallery looking at the history of photobook publishing in China.

The leaflet described it as the ‘largely unexplored’ history of Chinese photobook publishing and I must admit I can see why! It’s one of those shows where you are glad someone has collected these things but you hope not to sit next to them at a dinner party! The commentaries were amazingly detailed but just too much to read in this environment.

They did form an interesting history of China on the 20th century. The early pre-revolutionary section was interesting as it showed how European photographers had gone to China to record it. I was particularly struck by a book by Henri Cartier-Bressen.

I was amused by the Cultural Revolution books which blanked out people in later editions who had fallen from favour. There were some nice examples of this. It was also interesting to see how modern China was still using the medium.

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