This is Eric Miles for PhotoEye. Thanks so much for listening.
Imagine you're a photographer whose works are seen in every home, factory and workplace across a vast continent.
Imagine that your photographs are used to construct a mythology which fuels social ferment
in which up to 60 million may have died.
The work of Hobo and Zhuzhe Bing contributed, albeit unwittingly, to one of the most flagrant and outrageous personality cults in history.
Mao Zedong, a selection of photographs, features 200 of Hobo's works in a folio-sized volume with full-colour reproductions.
And just as with Lenny Riefenstahl, the work of Hobo expresses adulation that was undoubtedly sincere.
As Roland Barthes famously said, the principle of myth is that it transforms history into nature.
Thus we see Mao as the prophet, the peasant, the educator, the internationalist.
In over 12 years as Mao's personal photographer, Hobo and her husband Zhuzhe Bing produced pictures that burnished Mao's image.
Their work shaped the way he's seen, even now.
Mao exudes a range of emotions, pensive, jovial, serious, caring, fatherly.
The compositions are precise and purposeful.
And rather than situating these photographs in any specific time and place, the way in which they've been coloured does precisely the opposite.
The dark power of the work in this book is, as Hannah Arendt has said of propaganda, that it conjures up a lying world of consistency, which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.
Certainly, Hobo's pictures of Mao are a record of deception and the illusion made possible by the mechanical eye.
But seen from the point of view of a functional, instrumental, aesthetic style, they operate much like the very best advertising, branding, and public relations photographer.
Slick, unambiguous, and elegantly persuasive.
The second item we're going to feature, also a piece of Chinese propaganda photography, is the subject of a short review in the inaugural issue of the photo book review.
The piece is by Ruben Lundgren.
In the Great Hall of the People, we'll see how architectural photography played a role in the construction of not just Mao's mythology, but the entire edifice of state mythology.
This commemorative publication consists of a large format folio box with 20 colour photographs, unbound and printed on loose plates, accompanied by a title page and an introduction.
The Great Hall of the People was one of the ten great buildings, built in Beijing in 1959 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
At almost 172,000 square metres, the Great Hall of the People was the largest of the ten great buildings.
In these wide-angle images, the photographer crams information in, so it's as if we're peering simultaneously through a microscope and binoculars.
Like the architecture itself, the photographs both reveal and create a very precise order of things.
The subject matter and formal properties of these photographs combine seamlessly to inspire awe and to reinforce the myth of the state.
If both of these fascinating works of propaganda veil dark historical realities, they are both also celebrations of style, craftsmanship and the perfect photographic image.
This is Eric Miles for Photo Eye. Thanks so much for listening.
