Billboard, banner, blackboard: Marina Warner's photographs of the Cultural Revolution

In 2012 the Royal College of Art hosted an international conference, The Shadow of Language, which brought together artists and academics to explore the interplay between image, language and translation by focusing on contemporary Chinese practices. At the conference Marina Warner, the Anglo-Italian writer of fiction, criticism and history, addressed the question of translation through the shadows in animation in her keynote lecture, 'The Ambiguous Life of Shadows'. It was then that I found out that Marina Warner had a large collection of photographs she had taken in China less than a year before Mao Zedong's death. At the tail of the Cultural Revolution, the country was starting to open after decades of determined isolation. New political and economic relationships were being established, and invitations extended to artists and intellectuals in the West, such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was also invited, in 1972, be Premier Zhou Enlai to make the film Chung Kuo, Cina, a three and a half hour long document that focuses on the life of the people in China