Book Title: Party, Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tsung
Photographer/s: Cristina De Middel
Place of publication: Madrid, Spain
Year of publication: 2014
Publisher: Archive of Modern Conflict in association with RM Verlag
Language: English
Dimensions of book: 130 x 90 mm
Edition size: 1750
Binding, paper & printing details: Softcover with plastic dust jacket, perfect bound, colour digital prints on coated paper, text on uncoated paper.
Number of pages: 306
Number of pictures: 76
Designer: Nova Era
Cover Design: José Luis Lugo
Editor: RM / AMC
Printer: Nova Era
ISBN: 978-0-9570490-6-2
Retail price: 150 EUR
Where to buy; stores/ distributors/URLS: ‘Photobook Corner‘, ‘Amazon‘
Link/s to existing book reviews: ‘Conscientious Archive’, ‘Dazed’
Summary of project:
““If there is to be a revolution there must be a party”. This is how one of the most iconic and politically engaged book of the century would start if we applied an intentional filter. The filter would hide the parts of the slogans and sentences that got eventually obsolete in the last decades and the book is the Little red one: “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung”, the second most printed book in History (after the Bible) but a book that can only be found nowadays in China at some tourist shops. In an attempt to build a documentary object that to pushes the limits of documenting with images, the series “Party” presents a deliberately personal approach to the contemporary Chinese society and adds layers of significance by choosing a loaded platform. Using censorship to erase the parts of the text that are no longer in use in the country´s routine, the resulting pages become a script where the matching images build a series of diptychs that dynamical raise the question of the real nature of Communism in China these days.”
Cristina De Middel