Photos from the Front

By Guest blogger
12 December, 2014
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This article by Marine Cabos was first carried on the great Photography of China website. It is reproduced here with their kind permission.

Sha Fei (1912-1950) – literaly “sand flying” and aka Situ Chuan – was one of the most cherished photographers in China during the wartime years of 1937-1949, when China and Japan entered into conflict. In the 1930s, he became increasingly interested in photography, notably journalistic photographs he saw in foreign pictorial magazines of the period. At first active actor in the art photography scene, Sha Fei was quickly taken over by the leftwing and was appointed photo-reporter for a communist news organization in the late 1930s so that to capture battlefield scenes. While his powerful and dramatic photographs enhance a sense of theatricality, they also represent inestimable historical records that contributed to the shaping of political opinon at that time.