Photograph Description

The Propaganda Wall
By: Sherilyn Bumatay, Zayda Cavazos, and Paul Gonzales
Photography and edited with Photoshop

Our group researched the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which took place from 1966 to 1976. During the revolution, the Chinese government attempted to turn the country’s economy back to Communist, attacking citizens who were considered Capitalist in the process. Propaganda played an important role; posters called da-zi-bao were used as a form of humiliation by criticizing and insulting those with a bad class status.

Named after a chapter in our book, Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-li Jiang, our portrait demonstrates how a person living a bourgeois (capitalist) lifestyle would be treated. The American businessman observes the degrading posters, while his Chinese counterpart lies in the sun, exhausted and weak. Neighborhood authorities assumed him to be capitalist, and attacked him. They tore up his clothes, took his shoes, and publically humiliated him. Now, forced to change his ideology by reading Chairman Mao’s book (represented by a copy of our book), he is tired of all the insults and criticism.

Main points of emphasis in our portrait were the poster’s colors and the character’s costumes. According to the Chinese, Communism was symbolized with the color red, and black was its opposite; the phrases on our posters were written accordingly. For clothing: the successful American wears a business suit; a Chinese person in the same situation would wear western-styled clothing. At first, we used a digital camera to take photos of our model, Aldo Romero, wearing the two outfits separately. Then, we edited the shots in Photoshop to place the two characters in the same scene together.