Construction And Communication Of Children’s Image In New China Mainly Observing Photos Of China Pictorial (Renmin Huabao)1950-1955

Abstract:With a history of no more than two hundred years, photography has already reproduced various kinds of children’s images through the cooperation of photographers and mass media, aiming to fabricate different meanings and express picture-makers’social opinions and interests. Images of children were used as a projection of adults’expectation towards children, as resources for social criticism and mobilization, or as the symbol for consumerism.This research focuses on the photos of China Pictorial (Renming Huabao) in1950’s, observing the construction and communication of children’s images in early New China. By analyzing the mechanism, ideas and aesthetics of New China’s early official photojournalism, the author tries to make clear the relationship between photography and power/ideology.This study is divided into three parts:First, through collecting and analyzing children’s images in the China Pictorial (1950-1955), the author interprets/examines their visual rhetoric and layout in a photographic perspective, and sums up the main pictorial schema from "the motherland’s flower" to "the communist successor", and tracks the growth of children in New China. Second, reviewing the visual culture studies of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Stuart Hall’s "Representation", the author tries to analyze the sociological significance of those images, and then reveal the mechanism, ideas and the aesthetic origin of New China’s early photojournalism with the help of the official photographic guide Photographic Work (Sheying Yewu). Third, according to the socio-cultural and economic conditions of the fifties, the author depicts the communication mode and effect of children’s images. At last, the author wraps up the paper by reflecting the characteristics of photography as a visual medium based on the whole study.