Peasants prepare to transplant rice. May 11, 1957 [China.org.cn]

Photographer:

Zhang Zudao was born in a small village in Hunan in 1922 and studied sociology at Southwestern Associated University from 1945. He began to study photography at the same time and saved money to buy a camera. He worked as editor and photographer for New Observation magazine in Beijing from 1952 and investigated many villages in China with his teacher Fei Xiaotong. His collection "Memoir of Jiang Village" was first published in 2007. Zhang held a retrospective exhibition of his works of the past 60 years in Oct. 2008.

 

Zhang Zudao was the apprentice of leading Chinese sociologists Pan Guangdan and Fei Xiaotong and graduated from the department of sociology of Tsinghua University in the 1940s. Fei Xiaotong went to Jiang village to investigate 27 times from 1957 to the 1990s. Zhang went there with his teacher 5 times and recorded the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy with his camera. The two sets of pictures taken in 1957 and 1982 are especially precious for they record of beginning and end of collectivization. (Curator: Jiang Wei)