Representing History By Images

On February 15,1926 in Shanghai, the Young Companion Pictorial amazed the world by its first publication. Including the 3000 copies of the first edition which was sold out in two days, the insufficient 2000 copies of the second edition and another 2000 copies of the third edition, the sales volume of its first publication which amounted to 7000 copies was really great in those years. Up to the final publication of the Young Companion Pictorial in October,1945, more than thirty thousand of photos were published in it. Besides, during the 20 years, the reports on domestic and international current events together with the presentations in forms like picture and text about works of art, scientific knowledge, athletic contests and women's life make it a distinctive and comprehensive news pictorial of large-scale. Therefore, it's of historical and realistic significance to research it.News today will be history tomorrow. This paper is to study the transmission of the Young Companion Pictorial on the base of its history using the relative theories of journalism, communication, historiography and sociology, with emphasis on the discussion of "how to transmit" and "what to transmit". And exploring the reasons for Its success, from which summarizes the place of modern media for reference. The Young Companion Pictorial was copperplate-pressed with lots of news pictures in it. Chief editors including Wu Liande, Zhou Shoujuan, Liang Desuo, Ma Guoliang, Zhang Yuanheng and so on, collected for the sake of the Young Companion Pictorial, hold that the pictorial should be used to popularize education and spread knowledge. The content of news transmitted by the Young Companion is of rich connotation for the fact that it show great concern about the poor, the country and the fate of the nation, thirst for new things at the same time favor of old conventions which displayed not only an original landscape of Shanghai, but also of China in the 1920s and 1930s.