locating family portraits: everyday images from 1970s china / nicole huang

positions

Nicole Huang
Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China
positions Winter 2010 18(3): 671-693; doi:10.1215/10679847-2010-018

Abstarct
Family portraits from the 1960s and 1970s have been a source of inspiration for contemporary Chinese artists. In recent experimental works, many artists have used family portraits to reinvent the very ideas of the camera, the album, and the familial gaze as vehicles of longing, remembering, and contesting. This article pursues the prehistory of these images to critically address the recollection and reinvention of familial ties and bloodlines in contemporary Chinese art. The article studies a group of photographs taken during the second half of the Cultural Revolution, the early and mid-1970s, that define the “family portrait [quanjiafu]” as an important cultural genre, in dynamic contrast to photographic propaganda of the same period. Prior to the entrance of contemporary experimental artists, there was a subtle attempt to turn the photographic medium into narratives of personal histories, to locate and reinvent a “past” that was still very much the present. While recent studies of visual culture in postsocialist or post-Holocaust societies focus on “postmemory,” this article examines the mechanisms of materializing and restructuring personal memory that were in place before the Cultural Revolution had drawn to an end.

photography at tiananmen: pictorial frames, spatial borders, and ideological matrixes / yomi braester

positions

Yomi Braester
Photography at Tiananmen: Pictorial Frames, Spatial Borders, and Ideological Matrixes
positions Winter 2010 18(3): 633-670; doi:10.1215/10679847-2010-017

Abstract
The essay examines photography at Tiananmen from 1949 to the present. Personal mementos are placed within personal narratives and used as scaffolding for memory work. Documentary films juxtapose photography with other social practices at the square. Photography both conveys and shapes the relation between Tiananmen's two functions, as an emblem of the state and as a cement-covered recreational park. Through the overlap of multiple frames—pictorial, spatial, and ideological—images and social practices define the relationship between photographed subject and prevailing values and iterate the link between culture and politics.