Post edited 12:51 am – June 6, 2009 by DeeCW

Here is another collection of photographs that may be useful for teaching about China. The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946, is a collection of over 5,000 black and white photographs taken while the German-born photographer lived in Beijing.

 Michael Chang of George Mason University has written a guide to locating (using the Visual Information Access search engine)  and using the Hedda Morrison photos in teaching:  http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhisto…..4/whm.html   

 The following paragraph from Chang’s guide offers additional insights into using photography to support critical thinking:

 “Morrison’s photographs evoke a sense of quietude and quaintness. A useful classroom exercise might be to invite students to search for signs of historical change in Morrison’s photographs. Another possibility is to juxtapose Morrison’s photographs of north China with those images found on the site Shanghai in Images. How do the latter site’s photographs of the treaty port Shanghai differ from Morrison’s? To what can we attribute these differences? Geography and place? Intentions and motivations of the photographer? Addressing such questions would require students to think about the historical and social circumstances surrounding the production of these two archives and to critically engage with photographs, not as simple mirrors onto “reality,” but rather as historical sources.”

From the New Yorker blog by Evan Osnos:

"That is probably not the photo you think it is; it is from 1966. With all the reminders of the iconic images of Tiananmen Square in 1989, I am reminded of another set of images circulating this year from a very different moment on the same spot—a moment that is almost as iconic (and painful) in the Chinese imagination. And recalling both episodes together provides a bit of insight, perhaps, into some of the Chinese reaction to this week’s anniversary.

In 1966, a young French woman named Solange Brand was sent to work as a secretary at the French Embassy in Beijing. She carried a small Pentax camera and, though she didn’t know it at the time, she recorded the opening strains of the Cultural Revolution. Her slides and prints went into a shoe box, where they stayed for more than three decades, until 2002, when Brand, by then the Art Director of Le Monde Diplomatique, turned them into an award-winning book.

Jean Loh, the curator of Galerie Beaugeste, in Shanghai, put them on display this year with a show entitled “Beijing Sixty Six.” The effect, he writes, was electric: “[T]he Chinese public of a certain age—those who were at least 6 years old in 1966, and who have never set foot in a gallery or a museum—came to our exhibition in Shanghai and proclaimed in front of the enlarged print: ‘I was there! Exactly at this spot!’ One former Red Guard asked me to specifically take a picture of him standing by the enlarged print as if to finally own a picture certifying he had been there.”

This week, the Chinese authorities were determined to avoid any mention of the events of 1989, because it is an embarrassing and unresolved chapter in Chinese history. But many of us who live in China are familiar with another, more subtle dynamic unfolding these days: Chinese men and women who are old enough to remember the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution know that it shapes their interpretation of the crackdown in 1989. It was a tragedy, they say, but had it not been put down, perhaps China would have lost another ten years to chaos. It’s a harsh logic, but it is one I’ve heard a lot this week.

Amid the grim silence in Beijing this week, it’s easy to wonder why the Chinese government would not permit some memorial for an event that everyone but the most doctrinaire cadres agrees is a blot on the historic record. But if they opened that chapter of history, even an inch, they are afraid that people will say, to borrow the phrase, “I was there! Exactly at this spot!”"

More photos on Osnos' blog.  — Kevin Lawrence, Associate Director, Teach China (using other sign-in name)