Bruno Barbey “This picture was taken in 1980 during Bruno Barbey's second trip to Shanghai (he first visited in 1973). The year 1980 corresponded to the beginning of China's Reform and Opening era, which defini
(...) tively marked the end of the decade of Cultural Revolution. People aspired to a better life and better living: in the Yu Garden of Shanghai, one of the most scenic Chinese classic gardens in Shanghai, a woman was posing for a Rolleiflex-toting photographer, she was wearing a yellow polo and proudly flaunting her red handbag, which would have been a criminal possession during the Cultural Revolution. Yellow and red happen to be the two colors of Kodak brand identity, and Bruno Barbey was indeed using Kodachrome slides! The fact that the woman appeared on the right side of the picture, in contrast to the shadowy figures on the left, also creates a divide between color photography (right) and black & white photography (left), which was still very much a subject of debate in the world of photojournalism in the early 1980s. Yu Garden being located in the old Chinatown, one can see this picture as a perfect invitation to revisit Shanghai, a city that owes its cosmopolitan prosperity today and its cultural heritage to the Opium Wars that forced-open it to the West and to the world.” - Jean Loh, curator and director of the Beaugeste Gallery in Shanghai
YuYuan Gardens. Shanghai, China. 1980. © Bruno Barbey | Magnum Photos