Past Lives IN "Ethnography, Photojournalism and Propaganda: 1934-1975"

Trained or influenced by Sha Fei, the following generation of photographers went on to record China's Cultural Revolution. Mao's Cultural Revolution, a supposed campaign to rid the country of the "liberal bourgeoisie," destroyed national treasures and persecuted and killed academics and artists as well as religious and revolutionary figures. But Weng Nai­qiang, Ziao Zhuang and Weihong Shilong, photojournalists working for state newspapers, didn't photograph any of those things. What they did capture was the intoxicating drama and grandeur of the Revolution's enormous mass rallies and the charisma of those leading them.

Twenty years after Sha Fei, the Communist Party's control of its image was much more sophisticated. Anyone who has read an account of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution will experience cognitive dissonance in looking at these images. Everyone looks so joyous and idealistic in these photos. Mao's Little Red Book is everywhere. It is held aloft in mass rallies of thousands, and even enthusiastic foreigners march through Chinese streets with copies of it. Young women hold their books as they perform a "dance of loyalty" for an assembled crowd. Red Guards strike comically dramatic lunge poses and raise their books into the air. You can't escape it — people read aloud from it to train passengers, a group of small children study it, and families read it before dinner, surrounded by posters of Mao. The sheer ubiquitousness of the book is frightening.

You see the effects of his programs. Smiling college students are sent to be reeducated by poor farmers (I'm thinking they stopped smiling pretty quickly). Manual labor was a tool of redemption. In one photo, a massive dam is dug by hundreds of people using hand shovels, and in another (ridiculously staged) photograph, a couple dozen people are poised to attack enormous boulders with tiny hammers to build another dam. In these images, you almost believe that their zeal will make anything possible.

One image is especially ominous: A 1966 photograph records one small manifestation of the "Break the Four Olds Movement" — Old Custom, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. People are shown gathered around a bonfire, where, according to the caption for the photograph, "traditional objects" are burned. Just imagine the devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution agenda in a country with 5,000 years of culture.

What these exhibitions do better than any history book is create a tangible sense of loss. Next week, we'll look at photography after the Cultural Revolution in this space.