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Assignment: Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Series in Contemporary Photography) - Hardcover

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9780520239906: Assignment: Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (Series in Contemporary Photography)

Synopsis

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publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life's archives.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.

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About the Author

Jack Birns is a former Life photographer who was stationed in Shanghai during the final years of China's Civil War. Carolyn Wakeman is Associate Professor of Journalism and Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Asia-Pacific Program at the Graduate School of Journalism. Ken Light is a teaching fellow and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Orville Schell is the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the Inside Flap

"For over half a century, Americans have been pondering the reasons for the swift collapse of the Nationalist Chinese forces during 1948 and early 1949. Jack Birns’s agile lens brings many things into focus for us: the manifold levels of urban poverty, the breakdown of any pretense to social order, the random brutality meted out to suspected Communists, and the unsparing distance between foreign privilege and domestic deprivation. This book is a powerful addition to our pictorial and emotional record of those bitter months."—Jonathan D. Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

"As a journalist who covered the Chinese civil war and reported the Communist siege of Mukden and the fall of Nanjing and Shanghai in 1949, I can testify to the penetrating authenticity of these Jack Birns photographs, which capture the essence of the agonizing human upheaval on the eve of Mao Zedong’s ascent to power. Birns has given us a stunning pictorial record of focal events during a world-changing revolution."—Seymour Topping, former managing editor of the New York Times and SanPaolo Professor Emeritus of International Journalism, Columbia University

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Birns, Jack
Published by University of California Press, 2003
ISBN 10: 0520239903 ISBN 13: 9780520239906
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Jack Birns, Carolyn Wakeman, Ken Light, Jack Birns, Orville Schell,
ISBN 10: 0520239903 ISBN 13: 9780520239906
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Hardcover. Condition: Used - Very Good. 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. A collection of Birns' exquisite, excruciating, and previously unpublished photographs of the Chinese civil war, this book chronicles Shanghai life during its final descent into chaos in the years 1947-1949, when Mao's Communist forces took control of the country. Very nice clean, tight copy free of any marks. Seller Inventory # 319206

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Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st. Photography by Jack Birns. Foreward by Orville Schell. Bound in publisher's original grey cloth with spine stamped in gilt. Strikingly illustrated with roughly 100 previously unpublished black and white photographs. 9 x 13 1/4 inches. 130 pages. Seller Inventory # 9030604

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Hardcover. Folio, pp. xii, 130; black/white photos throughout; gray cloth boards in photo jacket; all good and sound. Seller Inventory # 84

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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. First edition (2003.) Hardcover with dust jacket. Folio with 130 pages. Signed by author/photographer on the half title page, " To Our Darling Friend Mildred, Whom we love for her wit and determination. So with warm regards and love from Jack and Harriet Birns February 25, 2004." The book and dust jacket are in very good condition with very slight shelf wear. Interior clean and tight. Pictures available upon request. Profusely illustrated. "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." White-Red spine/ Yellow text. #033812 Size: Folio. Signed. Photography / History / China. Seller Inventory # 033812

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