Assignment

Shipping out to China in December 1947 with three ten-year-old German cameras and a plum assignment from Life magazine, Jack Birns was fulfilling a boyhood dream. The reality was something else: refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests photographed in difficult and often dangerous circumstances amidst the poverty, corruption, and chaos of an expanding civil war. By then the ruling Nationalist Party had been battling the Communist threat for more than two decades, and Birns focused his camera on the human drama unfolding as war pressed ever closer to the country's financial, cultural, and commercial capital. His effort to show China's misery up close ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life's archives. Printed here for the first time, they offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.

Seen through the lens of hindsight, Birns's photographs give us a sense not only of what China was like more than fifty years ago, but also of why the warfare, weariness, and desperation of the time proved such fertile soil for communist revolution. Today these everyday scenes of ordinary people—pedicab drivers, street vendors, bar girls, police, politicians, prisoners—tell a story of national resilience and dignity in the midst of enveloping poverty, repression, and fear. Birns's stark black and white photographs capture the dramatic end of an era, but they also look forward, letting us glimpse how Shanghai's past prefigures the city's commercial and cultural revival in the 1990s.

（美）杰克・伯恩斯，美国《生活》杂志摄影记者，在中国内战的最后几年被派往上海进行战时报道。

1947年，当杰克・伯恩斯作为美国《生活》杂志摄影记者被派往上海的时候，正值中国内战时期。上海这座曾经繁华的国际都市正处于贫困、腐败和混乱的包围之中。不顾出版人亨利・R.卢斯的反对，伯恩斯将他的老相机聚焦在战乱中的普通人和他们的日常生活上，他在极其困难和危险的情况下，拍下了难民、乞丐、儿童、妓女、士兵以及贫富悬殊的生活、街头的行刑和市民的反抗，但当时这些照片许多都未获准发表。50多年后的今天，它们终于首次得以出版。今天看来，伯恩斯拍摄的这些反映战乱中普通人和普通生活的照片绝不普通，它们以静态的视角记录了一个时代的转折。