Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution. By Jack Birns, edited by Carolyn Wakeman and Ken Light. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 144 pp. $34.95; £22.95. ISBN 0-520-23990-3.]

Extract

The image of a desperate Shanghai on the eve of Liberation – memorably conveyed in Henri Cartier-Bresson's picture of a crowd queuing for gold outside a bank – is amplified by this fine volume of photos from Jack Birns, then on assignment for Life magazine. Many of his China negatives, which include some taken on side trips to cover the defence of Mukden and the battle of Xuzhou, were unused and lay in the TimeLife archives for half a century before being disinterred.

Life, as Orville Schell notes in his foreword, was the vehicle for some of the best photo-journalism of the mid-2000s, merging “a gritty current-affairs realism with a keen eye and fine sense of composition.” Yet the picture of Kuomintang brutality, muddle and corruption was often too gritty for Life's publisher Henry R. Luce who over the years had placed Chiang Kai-shek seven times on the cover.