About Chinese Photography

Chinese Photography

Overview

Chinese Photography (Zhongguo Sheying) is a monthly magazine published in Beijing, China, founded in 1957 as the journal of the Chinese Photographers Association — in its founding years, the China Photography Society. It is China's flagship photography magazine: the official journal through which the country's organised photographic profession has presented its work for nearly seventy years. Reference descriptions of the magazine record that it publishes portfolios, criticism and technical features, and that it documents the development of Chinese photography from the socialist period to the digital era, tied to the association's national exhibitions and awards. Standard references on photography in China list it first among the country's photographic magazines — Chinese Photography (Beijing), publishing as of 1957, ahead of its sister title Popular Photography (1958). Its founding followed immediately on the founding conference of the China Photography Society in December 1956, at which 104 acclaimed photographers from across the country gathered in Beijing. A group portrait of that gathering, more than four metres wide in exhibition reproduction, has become an emblem of the profession the magazine was created to serve. This profile traces the magazine's origins, its association, and its documentary role.

Founding in 1957 and the Photographers' Society

Chinese Photography was founded in 1957, months after the event that created its publisher. On 22 December 1956, right after the founding conference of the China Photography Society — renamed the China Photographers Association in 1980 — 104 acclaimed photographers from all over the country gathered in Beijing for a group portrait, with Shi Shaohua, who was elected chair of the society during the conference, among them. The society gave China's photographers, for the first time, a national professional organisation; the magazine, launched the following year as its journal, gave that organisation a public face and its members a place to publish. The pairing of association and journal was the standard institutional pattern of the period — writers, artists and musicians all received their associations and house journals in the same years — but photography's version came with a distinctive mission. Photography in the new China was simultaneously an art, a documentary instrument and a mass technical hobby, and its journal had to serve professionals whose work appeared in newspapers, pictorials and exhibitions across the country. Chinese Photography has occupied that position, as the association's flagship title, from 1957 to the present.

The Editors and the Early Magazine

The human texture of the early magazine emerges from the recollections of its circle. Di Yuancang, one of the few editors who introduced Western photography to Chinese readers after 1949, had been an editor before the Cultural Revolution for major pictorials and photography magazines including Chinese Photography, and was an alternate member of the first council of the China Photography Society when it was established in 1956 — his portrait appears in the society's founding group photograph. His career points to a function of the journal that outsiders easily miss: in the 1950s and early 1960s, when China's photographic community had limited contact with the outside world, its flagship magazine was a channel through which foreign photographic practice reached Chinese readers, mediated by bilingual editor-specialists. Around the magazine stood the society's leadership — Shi Shaohua, its first chair, a photographer whose own career in Communist wartime photography reached back to the Jin-Cha-Ji border region's pictorial of 1942, the first photographic magazine published by the Communist Party. The founding generation thus connected the new journal to the wartime documentary tradition that the People's Republic regarded as photography's heroic age in China.

What the Magazine Publishes

Chinese Photography publishes portfolios, criticism and technical features. The portfolio is its core: sequences of photographs by Chinese photographers, presented at a quality that lets the work be judged as art and document, and that makes the magazine a printed exhibition between the association's physical exhibitions. Criticism gives the profession its discourse — essays on photographic history, aesthetics and the direction of Chinese photography, by critics and scholars as well as practitioners. Technical features serve the working photographer, addressing the craft's changing tools, from film-era darkroom practice to digital workflow. Reference summaries add the institutional dimension: the magazine is tied to the Chinese Photographers Association's national exhibitions and awards, publishing and publicising the work those juries select, so that its pages and the association's honours reinforce each other as the profession's twin records. A monthly journal that combines those four elements — pictures, criticism, technique and the association's official life — is less a consumer magazine than the proceedings of a national art form, issued twelve times a year from Beijing.

A Record of Chinese Photography's Development

Reference descriptions of Chinese Photography emphasise that it documents the development of Chinese photography from the socialist period to the digital era. That documentary value is a function of continuity and comprehensiveness. Through the decades when photography in China served as a socialist-realist documentary and propaganda instrument, the magazine recorded the official profession's output and ideals; through the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the reforms that followed, it registered the art's transformation. Scholars reconstructing the unofficial photography of the late 1970s — the April Photography Society's Nature, Society, Man exhibition of April 1979, with 280 photographs by fifty-one photographers, which marked the beginning of a new era for Chinese photography — measure the new work precisely against the official photography magazines of the period, such as Chinese Photography, in which the established profession published. The magazine is thus a source for both sides of the story: the art the association promoted, and the baseline against which every subsequent movement, from the documentary turn of the 1980s to the conceptual photography of the 1990s and the digital era, defined itself. A complete run of the journal is, in effect, the official history of Chinese photography written monthly by its participants.

The Association, Exhibitions and Awards

The magazine's tie to the Chinese Photographers Association's national exhibitions and awards deserves emphasis, because exhibitions are where Chinese photography has traditionally been consecrated. The association's national exhibitions gather the profession's best work from every province; its awards define careers; and its journal publishes the results, extending a temporary exhibition in Beijing into a permanent printed record distributed nationwide. The pattern began at the founding: the society's first conference in December 1956 was itself commemorated in the famous group portrait of 104 photographers, an image later exhibited at the National Art Museum of China at monumental size in the 2018 exhibition devoted to Shi Shaohua — a reminder that the community the magazine serves has always understood photography's power to memorialise itself. Within this system, Chinese Photography functions as the profession's memory and bulletin at once: who was selected, who was honoured, what the juries valued, and how the leadership of the association framed the art's direction, all appear in its pages across nearly seventy years.

The Flagship and Its Sister Title

Standard references divide China's association photography magazines into a pair. Photography in China references list Chinese Photography (Beijing), publishing as of 1957, and Popular Photography (Beijing), publishing as of 1958 — both under the photographers' association system. The division of labour between them is recorded in their descriptions: Chinese Photography is the flagship, oriented to the professional and artistic core of the field, with portfolios, criticism and the association's exhibition record; Popular Photography addresses the amateur and club photographers of China's mass photography movement, with reader portfolios, competitions and technique features. The pairing allowed one association to speak to two publics — the profession and its vast amateur penumbra — in two registers, from 1957 and 1958 respectively. That the flagship has retained its position through the digital transformation of photography — when every phone became a camera and the amateur-professional boundary dissolved — testifies to the institutional strength of the association model: exhibitions, awards and a journal of record remain valuable to photographers precisely because images have become infinitely abundant and professional consecration correspondingly scarce.

Chinese Photography in Context

Photography arrived in China in the mid-nineteenth century, in Macao and the treaty ports, and in the twentieth century it was used, as elsewhere, for recreation, record keeping, journalism, political communication and fine art. What distinguishes the Chinese case is the degree of organisation: from the wartime Jin-Cha-Ji Pictorial of 1942, the first photographic magazine of the Communist movement, through the founding of the national society in 1956, photography in the People's Republic was built as a profession with associations, exhibitions and journals. Chinese Photography, founded in 1957 as that profession's journal, sits at the centre of the structure. Its pages connect the wartime documentary generation of Shi Shaohua to the reform-era documentarists and the digital-era artists, because all of them passed, at some point, through the association's exhibitions and its magazine. For historians of photography outside China, the journal is equally indispensable: it is the most complete single printed source for what Chinese photographers, in their official capacity, made and valued across the second half of the twentieth century.

Standing and Legacy

Chinese Photography's position is settled in the reference record: founded in Beijing in 1957 as the journal of the national photographers' association founded months earlier, it is China's flagship photography magazine, listed first among the country's photographic periodicals, and still published monthly. It publishes portfolios, criticism and technical features; it is tied to the association's national exhibitions and awards; and it documents the development of Chinese photography from the socialist period to the digital era. Behind those summary facts stands a community: the 104 photographers in the founding portrait of December 1956, the editors like Di Yuancang who kept Chinese readers in touch with world photography, and the generations since who have used the magazine as the profession's exhibition between exhibitions. Nearly seventy years after its founding, Chinese Photography remains what it was created to be — the journal of record of Chinese photography, in which the art's official history continues to be written, one monthly issue at a time.