Mending Memory by Hand and Brush: Socialist China's Colored Photographs

Abstract

A remarkable quality of Chinese vernacular photographs during the socialist period is their efflorescence of color. From studio colorists well-versed in the art of potassium cyanide to private brushstrokes in thick marker, the prevalence of photo-coloring (zhuose) evidenced a marked degree of dissatisfaction with an unmanipulated print. Bracketed by Chinese photo studios’ national institutionalization in 1956 and the promulgation of commercial color rolls in the 1980s, this discussion builds from extant scholarship on Chinese vernacular photographs of the 1960s and 1970s. By analyzing colored Tiananmen photographs of the Cultural Revolution, a posthumous biography of photo-colorist Zhou Qi, and various examples from the volume Anonymous Photos (Yiming zhao), this article demonstrates that photo-coloring was a crucial aesthetic agent in negotiations between officially mandated postures and bold ways of inscribing individual experiences as chromatic repositories of memory and meaning, marking a site where mass visuality and more specific imaginations of the self collided into color.