Studies On The Cover Transformation And Formation Mechanism Of China Pictorial (from 1978 To 2003)

The dissertation takes the covers of China Pictorial (from 1978 to 2003) as the research object, focusing on the relationships between the transformation of cover photography and that of the society, and then makes research into the factors contributing to the cover creation. With an overall statistical analysis about 315 pictorial covers while giving priorities to the research about certain cover series such as landscape covers, figure covers, and festival covers, the dissertation comes to the conclusion that the focus of the pictorial has changed somehow since the reform and opening up, shifting its focus from daily life to politics, with more diversified options of covers to reflect China's modernization process. The dissertation divides the time into three phases for comparison purpose. Among the landscape series the number of city landscape covers was up to 66.67% in 1999 from 13.04% before 1992. Of the cover figure series, the number of contemporary figures on the covers was up to 12% while in 1992 no such kind of covers was ever in existence. At the same time, the number of covers about political figures was up to 52% from 7.96%. Studies show that social transformation, which provides pictorials with abundant and vivid social content, makes an objective impact on cover creation. Cover creation of pictorials is confined to the social activities and features the life of that particular time. Social transformation diversifies readers'demands and thus has become one of the factors affecting pictorial cover creation since the marketization of periodicals requires more devotion to readers'demands. As the"gatekeepers", pictorial editors and editors-in-chief, have subjective influences over cover creation. Their likes and dislikes will affect the pictorial cover creation to a certain degree. Besides, the development of modern technology offers new approaches to pictorial cover creation.