On November 25, 1948, French artist Henri Cartier-Bresson received a telegram from Magnum, the photographic cooperative he cofounded in 1947, asking him to go to China to work on a story for Life magazine titled “The Last Time We Saw Peiping.” He arrived in Beijing just as the Kuomintang was falling and stayed for twelve days until the People’s Liberation Army forced him to move on. For ten months, between December 1, 1948, and September 23, 1949, he documented the retreat of Nationalist forces and the establishment of communism throughout the country, shooting nearly 900 photographs. Dozens of these images were published in Life as well as Illustrated (London) and Regards (Paris), in some forty photo-essays. He returned to China a decade later, in 1958, staying for four months, between June 16 and October 23. This trip was meticulously arranged by his Chinese hosts and yielded 376 rolls of film. The photographs from both trips have been compiled into three books: From One China to Another (1956), China: As Photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1964), and Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948−1949, 1958 (2019).
The directive from Life was to concentrate on scenes that revealed “Chinese culture and character, the human angle of the city.” Cartier-Bresson made handwritten notes about each roll of film, which he then turned into captions. This photograph is accompanied by a lengthy text:
General Ma Hung-kwei came to Nanking, Kuomintang capital, every year to meet Marshal Chiang K’ai-shek. The first syllable of his name, Ma, means horse, a very common designation among Chinese Moslems. Behind him, carefully written, are some old rhymed precepts: “A good general should be praised during a hundred generations. He should be full of care for his men and also for his people.” General Ma was the big war lord of Northwest China. His secretaries were dressed as hospital nurses. He adored ice-cream and always had bucketfuls handy, and offered it to his guests. Shortly after this photograph was taken, General Ma was abandoned by his troops. (Mid-April 1949)
Cartier-Bresson often used the term “the decisive moment” to describe that fraction of a second when the precise organization of forms and the significance of an event converge in the camera. The images made in China reveal his efforts to capture the interconnected worlds of cultural events, political figures, Maoist propaganda campaigns, ordinary people, and landscapes. His work in China during this turbulent time was critical for his career and established him as a pioneer of photojournalism.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2025
