Chinese Documentary Photography And Representation Of Civilian Consciousness (1976-2014)

After the Cultural Revolution, documentary photography, a photography style which is different from the political ideology publicity and takes the personal and civilian view to keep an eye on daily life of ordinary people, revived and rose. Over the 30 years ever since the initiation of social transformation till today, it has developed into an important cultural movement through consistent attention to civilians, especially the grass roots, as well as interaction and relevance with social reality. In the fields of literature and art and media culture, it has achieved many influential research fruits in analyzing representation and characterization of civilian image and civilian consciousness in the transitional society in literature, drama, movies and TV plays, TV news and other media texts. However, few researches sort out the course of Chinese social transformation through visual image texts, especially documentary photography of daily life of ordinary people and study the relationship between this course and photography representation.In the perspective of cultural research, abiding by the two research approaches of poetic (semiotics theory) and politics (discourse theory), using Peter Hamilton’s concept of "Dominate Paradigm of Photography", this article tries to get it sorted the changing process of civilian image and civilian consciousness in domestic documentary photography between 1978-2014, attempts to make it clear the interactive relationship between changes of civilian image and social progress in the transformation period, and discusses the presentation practice of how visual construction affects and restrains photographers in different historical periods.The framework of this article is composed by 5 chapters of 3 parts, namely introduction, main part, and conclusions. The introduction mainly illustrates the core concept and the theoretical framework used in the research, reviews the researches about documentary photography carried out by scholars both home and abroad. The three chapters of the main part respectively discuss visual practice of documentary photography representing civilian and civilian consciousness in three periods of time, which are 1978-the early 1990s,1992-2007, and 2008-2014. Based on this, this article concludes the dominant paradigm that documentary photography represents civilians in each historical period, extracts specific connotation of civilian consciousness, and tries to analyze the interactive relationship in transformation period among social background, visual system and visual representation, thus to further explores causes for the fact that the civilian group are injected with different cultural meanings in the three historical periods. Based on the whole article, the conclusion part shows the history of changes of civilian image in domestic documentary photography over the 30 years of social transformation, and provides an outlook of development tendency of implication practice that documentary photography represents civilians under the Internet language environment.The research suggests that over the 30 years since the Reform and Opening-up, along with the promotion of transformation procedure and change of visual system’s content, there are mainly three changes in domestic documentary photography. As for the visual power relationship, it experienced the change from elites and professionals representing civilians to civilians representing themselves. As for photographing and working manner, it experienced the change from street snapshot to participatory observation and shooting at a close distance. As for the main media, it experienced the change from photographic exhibitions to documentary image-text books and special photography edition newspaper and then to online documentary pictures. The evolution of representation subjects, shooting methods and communication channels decide that civilian image in documentary photography development shows characteristics with dominant meanings in the three historical periods, and documentary photography also interacts and connects with social reality with different methods in different stages.