China in colour: Bruno Barbey on documenting the development of a global superpower over 45 years

During the past 45 years, China has been transformed from a large but undeveloped country into one of the world's foremost industrial superpowers. Throughout that period, senior Magnum photographer Bruno Barbey has been assembling a unique body of work that documents ways in which the country has changed beyond recognition.

China is just one of the many subjects Bruno has explored in his long career. As a photojournalist he has covered news stories around the world, including wars and conflicts in Nigeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and Iraq. He has also documented life in a range of countries including Morocco, Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria and Italy. He has published over 30 books and staged more than 80 exhibitions of his work worldwide.

However, China has remained fascinating to him and he has returned many times. This work has resulted in two recent books on the country: China: From Mao to Modernity (2015) and The Color of China (2019).

Bruno's work has found a receptive audience, not least in China itself. He recently staged a major exhibition of his photographs of the country in its National Art Museum in Beijing, which was seen by 80,000 visitors in just 10 days.

Shooting in colour

Other Magnum photographers photographed the country in previous decades, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud, but they all shot in black and white. Although monochrome was still dominant in documentary photography in the early 1970s, Bruno wanted to shoot in colour from the outset.

Black and white, he explains, was dominant for both aesthetic and practical reasons. "At that time, colour reproduction, even in the most famous magazines, was poor," he says. "I used to work a lot with National Geographic, and when I look at those articles today I see they're not so well printed. But I've always been fascinated by colour, maybe because I was born in Morocco, which is a country of light and colour. For me it started in the mid-1960s, when I was sent to Brazil by Vogue magazine and took a few hundred colour films with me. I really started to take colour photography seriously from then on. I especially love shooting colour on the latest digital cameras. And magazines now are very well printed."

In the field

Bruno's practical approach is to choose a particular place he wants to shoot and simply wait for something to happen that he wants to photograph. One favourite place is in Shanghai, looking over the Huangpu river towards the city, where at weekends there are lots of things going on. He always likes to keep both foreground and background in mind when he's shooting, so he can juxtapose different elements in a scene. The most important thing for him, however, is that people are not aware they are being photographed.

"In most of the pictures I take, people don't realise they have been photographed, or they have just realised it a moment before," he says. "I shoot very quickly. Sometimes, even now, I shoot without putting the camera to my eye so I can be more discreet. Of course, when you shoot a lot, the editing is an important part of the images. 50% of my work is done when shooting, 50% in post production.

"Usually I take the pictures first and ask permission afterwards, unless I'm doing a portrait and the person and I get to know each other first. But if you want to have a natural situation, if you ask permission first it's finished. People will not be natural any more and the situation will be destroyed, so most of the time I never ask permission."

Perhaps surprisingly, Bruno says he hasn't encountered bad reactions when photographing people in China. "In China or Japan, or in Asia in general, there's not much of a problem with photographing people," he says. "Maybe that's because they're keeping polite for foreigners. It's easier to take pictures in, say, Shanghai than in Paris. In Paris you take pictures and somebody will challenge you and say they're going to sue you. That's not such problem in China. The Chinese love photography; it's fantastic how they are motivated and fascinated by it."

Although he's now 78, Bruno has lost none of his appetite for photography and has further photographic trips planned to both China and Morocco. "Being a member of the French Academie des Beaux-Arts, I am surrounded by friends and great artists and some of them are very old and still working," he says. "Some photographers work into their 90s. I will continue to work while I am, as we say, 'bon pied, bon oeil' [literally, 'good foot, good eye']. I hope to be able to work as much as I can until the end."