The Year of the Dragon

Author
Nina Zurier

Decade

In the summer 1953 Aperture issue SFAI instructor and Aperture cofounder and editor Minor White described how second-year students in the SFAI photo department produced the work included in the magazine:

“The teaching objective in this last project contained several elements that may have interest to other than students. One was to build on top of a firm foundation of camera handling a project that would severely tax the student’s capacity to see and to grasp the significance of an event. Another objective was to let the student see how the process of editorializing works; a third was to open his eyes to the limits of the medium in matters of communication; a fourth was to lead his thinking from his own self-centered project to a much bigger one where he could encounter photography as a force; where he could be shown that photography is not only an end in itself, but is a tool.”

“In 1951, while studying at CSFA, Wong received a Third Honorable Mention in Life magazine’s photography contest. Wong then won the Albert Bender Award in photography in 1952. Most grants were awarded to painters, but Wong was the first to receive a grant in photography. Wong was funded to observe the effects on American Chinese living in the United States when the Communist Party took power in China. It was unclear whether Chinese in America would be able to go back and visit their family groups and ancestors in China. People in China didn’t know if they should be communicating with their relatives in America. Wong’s project, The Year of the Dragon, showed the Chinese people in a time of turmoil and deep political unrest. The Year of the Dragon was published in Aperture in 1953, and the original portfolio is in the San Francisco Art Institute Library.”

—excerpt from William Heick, Ira H. Latour, and C. Cameron Macauley, The Golden Decade: Photography at the California School of Fine Arts 1945–55 (Steidl, 2016)