Shipping out to China in December 1947 with three ten-year-old German cameras and a plum assignment from Life magazine, Jack Birns was fulfilling a boyhood dream. The reality was something else: refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests photographed in difficult and often dangerous circumstances amidst the poverty, corruption, and chaos of an expanding civil war. By then the ruling Nationalist Party had been battling the Communist threat for more than two decades, and Birns focused his camera on the human drama unfolding as war pressed ever closer to the country's financial, cultural, and commercial capital. His effort to show China's misery up close ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life's archives. Printed here for the first time, they offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.
Seen through the lens of hindsight, Birns's photographs give us a sense not only of what China was like more than fifty years ago, but also of why the warfare, weariness, and desperation of the time proved such fertile soil for communist revolution. Today these everyday scenes of ordinary people—pedicab drivers, street vendors, bar girls, police, politicians, prisoners—tell a story of national resilience and dignity in the midst of enveloping poverty, repression, and fear. Birns's stark black and white photographs capture the dramatic end of an era, but they also look forward, letting us glimpse how Shanghai's past prefigures the city's commercial and cultural revival in the 1990s.
7 有用 唐晓枫 2016-01-07 15:18:16
在四楼外文阅览室看的,开本巨大画质超清,每张图都能让人泪流满面。那代被战争残害的人们,是真实存在过,却又被忽略和掩盖,我们对民国上海的记忆只停留在三十年代的摩登上海是何其的自欺欺人。
2 有用 sputnik 2007-05-10 18:42:09
大开本,细节丢失很少。和中文本参照起来看很有意思。后者的一些注解做了饶有意味的变通。
2 有用 費來德後花園 2013-11-02 23:21:57
差点看哭了。有太多东西值得探究:1. 国共军队形象。2. 上海城市景观。3. 西方记者的视角与“摄影语言”。4. 被看的行刑场面。5. 逃走的与进来的。6. 灾难还是新生?7. 文字和图像的佐证与谎言的拆穿。 8. “现代化”的真实与建构。P.S南大外文阅览室还是有不少宝贝哈哈
0 有用 nagoshi 2011-09-15 12:32:16
Chinese civil war
1 有用 [已注销] 2007-12-26 22:42:18
(美)杰克。伯恩斯
0 有用 Σigmä々 2023-12-21 17:59:23 浙江
历历在目的时光,贫富差距
0 有用 光明哥 2023-10-21 19:02:42 河北
千辛万苦,搞到了这本原版书,比中文版开本更大,细节更多,也把删节的照片补上了。
0 有用 陶者无缰 2023-06-25 03:11:34 美国
In a war you can only cover one side, but during those eventful months, I favored neither the Nationalists nor the Communists. I could see that the long-suffering Chinese were ill served by both sets ... In a war you can only cover one side, but during those eventful months, I favored neither the Nationalists nor the Communists. I could see that the long-suffering Chinese were ill served by both sets of leaders, and I felt great sympathy for the ordinary people. ——Birns 未發表的手稿《中國,曾經(1947-1949)》 (展开)
7 有用 唐晓枫 2016-01-07 15:18:16
在四楼外文阅览室看的,开本巨大画质超清,每张图都能让人泪流满面。那代被战争残害的人们,是真实存在过,却又被忽略和掩盖,我们对民国上海的记忆只停留在三十年代的摩登上海是何其的自欺欺人。
2 有用 費來德後花園 2013-11-02 23:21:57
差点看哭了。有太多东西值得探究:1. 国共军队形象。2. 上海城市景观。3. 西方记者的视角与“摄影语言”。4. 被看的行刑场面。5. 逃走的与进来的。6. 灾难还是新生?7. 文字和图像的佐证与谎言的拆穿。 8. “现代化”的真实与建构。P.S南大外文阅览室还是有不少宝贝哈哈