The Challenging Archive: Studying Photographers of the Chinese Communist Party
For the past decade, our research has focused on a group of CCP (Chinese Communist Party) photographers whose careers span from the 1930s to the 1980s. Despite their prominence in Mao’s China, neither their careers nor their works have enjoyed in-depth studies that go beyond generalized analysis of “propaganda.” As most of them began their work during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), their photography played an important role in mass mobilization, either documenting the war or recording various campaigns in the Communist bases known as the Liberated Areas.