Lei Kaibin

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AS the first photographer from New Zealand to visit China since its founding, Tom Hutchins came to this unfamiliar land determined to explore and record the new nation through his lens.

During an interview with John B. Turner at the Shenzhen International Photography Exhibition (SZIPE) on Thursday, the co-curator of Hutchins’ exhibit sat down with the Shenzhen Daily to talk. “In terms of timeliness, Hutchins is one of the most important foreign photographers to visit China,” said Turner.

“He was the first non-Communist Western photojournalist to cover revolutionary China since Henri Cartier-Bresson,” wrote Turner in the book he edited — “Tom Hutchins Seen in China 1956.”

Another curator, Sue Yuzhou, who is an editor at the China Photographers Association, selected works from Hutchins’ first visit to Guangzhou in 1956 with Turner.

The curators went through 600 photos that Hutchins and Turner had spent 20 years selecting as the most significant of the 6,000 taken during Hutchins’ four-month visit to China.

“I secretly celebrated this first success in doing what I had come to China for — photographing in my own way and on my own terms these people who number a quarter of mankind,” this is a quote from Hutchins’ unpublished manuscript entitled “The Bridge at Shumchun,” written May 9, 1956, when he was anxious about the formal requirements of entering China which was at the time closed to most of the world, according to Turner.

Dropped by the newspaper he had been working for due to being issued a visa by the Chinese Government, Hutchins was not to be deterred from seeing the new nation, despite the Cold War and existing Western propaganda. “Although New Zealand did not go so far as the United States, which banned its journalists and photographers from visiting China, it toed the capitalist world’s anti-Communist U.S. line,” wrote Turner.

According to Turner, unlike many other photographers who Hutchins believed to have subjective and artistic agendas, he intended to make his record of Chinese life as objective as possible with as little input from his personal point of view as he could manage.

“The pictures we selected are all related to urban life. Relatively speaking, this exhibition happens to be convened in Shenzhen, so we believe those images will resonate most with people from Guangzhou and here,” said Sue. “What’s more, 1956 was a positive and buoyant year for China, which is why we thought these works would be ideal to be shown to the public.”

Nearly 50 years before Hutchins passed away in 2007, the photographer tried many times and failed to publish his visual record of revolutionary China, leading him to eventually lose interest in publishing. He turned to photography education and founded the first full-time academic course on film and photography in the British Commonwealth.

Before the SZIPE, an exhibition of Hutchins’ China essay debuted at the Pingyao International Festival of Photography in 2016.