The Milanese exhibition was created in collaboration with the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and see beyond 100 original prints along with period magazine publications, documents and letters from the Foundation's collection.
An exhibition itinerary that tells two key moments in the history of China: the fall of the Kuomintang (1948-1949) and the Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" (1958): On November 25, 1948, “Life” magazine commissions Henri Cartier-Bresson a report on the "last days of Beijing" before the arrival of Mao's troops. The stay, scheduled for two weeks, will last ten months, mainly in the Shanghai area. Cartier-Bresson will document the fall of Nanjing, ruled by the Kuomintang, and will then find himself forced to stay for four months in Shanghai, controlled by the Communist Party. He will then leave the country a few days before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China (October 1, 1949).
Cartier-Bresson's long stay in China marks a turning point in the history of photojournalism: the Magnum Photos agency had been founded (with the participation of Cartier-Bresson himself) eighteen months earlier in New York, and Chinese reportage presented a new style that was very attentive both to the subjects portrayed and to the formal balance of the composition. Many of these images are among the most famous in the history of photography (for example, the Gold Rush in Shanghai).
Since the XNUMXs, Cartier-Bresson has become one of the major reference names for the "new" photojournalism and, in general, of the renewal of photography. The volumes The Decisive Moment (Verve, 1952) and Of a China à l'autre (Delpire, 1954), with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, confirm this.
In 1958 Cartier-Bresson set out on the road again, this time in a completely different situation: for four months he traveled many kilometers in China to visit selected places, iron and steel complexes, large dams under construction, oil wells and rural villages. A journey that allows him to immortalize him exploitation of human labor, military control, the omnipresence of propaganda. Again, the report China 1958 will enjoy great editorial success.
