Title: The three banners of China
Photographer(s): Marc Riboud
Writer(s): Marc Riboud
Designer(s):
Publisher(s): Joh.Enschedé en Zonen N.V., Haarlem, The Netherlands
Year: 1966
Print run:
Language(s): English
Pages: 216
Size: 22 x 26,5 cm
Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Edition:
Print:
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: China, 1957-1965
ISBN:
It was in 1957 that Riboud entered China, among the first Western photographers to visit the country. His second visit was in 1965, a time of great upheaval. Chairman Mao was on the verge of launching the ruinous and repressive Cultural Revolution, which proceeded under what were known as the “Three Banners”: the agricultural communes, the industrial expansion of the “Great Leap Forward,” and the organization of daily life by the Communist Party.
Riboud spent four months in China, crossing 12 of its 18 provinces, travelling some 12,500 miles in total. He photographed schools and colleges, factories and workshops as well as ordinary people in the course of their increasingly regimented everyday lives. The cover of the collection, featured here, hints at the gap between propaganda and reality; a weatherbeaten peasant, engrossed perhaps in his own private concerns, walks beneath a poster depicting two animated model citizens facing in the opposite direction, staring gladly into the Great Beyond.