News Photography In China

Modern photography was introduced into China in the 1840's when the Opium War took place, while news photography was born in China till the 20th century. So far, it only undergoes a century's development.In the first half-century's development, dramatic changes happened in China as it underwent various ups and downs like warlords battles, bourgeois revolution, anti-Japanese war and cooperation between the KMT party and the CPC party in fighting against foreign enemies.Such a special history period was an excellent opportunity for China's news photography development, while it also encountered many hardships.It is in this period that China's news photography industry came into being.The paper studied China's news photography development process and reached a conclusion so that we could have better understanding about news photography and hopefully, the paper could do some basic work for future's study by using valuable historical records which is collected in the Special Tibetan Literature Reading Room of LanZhou University and Library of Gansu Province as well as some researches and dissertations.The paper is divided into three parts.In the preface, the paper pointed out the necessity and significance of studying China's news photography in the first half of the 20th century by analyzing the history of news photography.The second part, "news photography and its characters", demonstrates the connotations of new photography and its application, in the meanwhile, it also made a further exploration on the characters of news photography.The third part, also the main body, has five chapters in elaborating news photography's features at different development stages.The first chapter introduced news photography's first stage from 1840s to 1900 and noted that though photography has been introduced into China at that time, photos were not seen on papers.The second chapter, that is the bud stage for news photography from 1900 to 1911, analyzed that domestic newspapers began to use news photos, but major parts were sceneries and static characters' photos, though news reports were mixed, photos lacked timeliness and sense of scene.In the third chapter, that is the initial development stage from 1912 to 1927, the paper pointed out that pictorials popped up and began to publish news photos.The fourth chapter described the tortuous period of news photography development from 1927 to 1937 when 10-year Civil War took place, news photo development was trapped in depression.The fifth one introduced China's news photography industry's formation and development from 1937 to 1945, some theories on news photography were brought up.