Hou Bo

Hou Bo 侯波 (born 1924) is a Chinese photographer who, with her husband Xu Xiaobing, was among the best known photographers of Mao Zedong. Born into a poor peasant family, Hou Bo joined the Communist Party at the age of fourteen and learned photography during the Second Sino-Japanese War in order to present a better image of the Party's work to the world. After 1949, she and Xu Xiaobing lived in the same compound as Mao and took both official photos, some used for posters and publicity, which became the most widely circulated photos of Mao, and some family photos, taken informally behind the scenes.

Among her best known photographs are "The Founding of the PRC" (1949), "Mao Zedong Swimming Across the Yangzi" (1955), "Chairman Mao at Work in an Airplane" (1959), and "Mao Zedong with Students from Latin America" (1959), which won First Prize in the National Photography Exhibition of 1959.

Hou Bo was born in 1924 and was from a poor peasant background. She joined the Chinese Communist Party at 14. Her father, a laborer, was beaten to death by factory owner who refused to pay him, and her mother died of grief soon after. When she made her way to Yan'an, she finished school and enrolled in the Anti-Japanese Military and Politics University, where she studied politics.

She and her future husband, Xu Xiaobing, then a PLA photographer, met in Yan'an in early 1942 and he introduced her to photography. They married in the spring of 1943. Hou Bo later recalled, "About 10 friends gathered with us in our cave; we bought jujubes and dried buns, and we all sang together". Work asssignments separated the couple for long periods of time, but Hou studied photography with Japanese prisoners. In January 1949, when the PLA entered Beiping, Hou and Xu were reunited in Mao's summer house in his Fragrant Hills temporary headquarters outside the city where Xu was photographing Mao's meetings with foreign delegations. Mao took an interest in Hou Bo, asking where she came from, and saying that she "grew up on the millet of Yan'an, so you must serve the people." Mao asked her to join his group of official photographers.

Hou's photo of Mao and other new leaders on October 1, 1949, proclaiming the founding of the Peoples Republic of China is one of the most widely distributed photographs of modern times, but she also took less formal pictures of the leadership. She later recalled that when, "after all present sang the national anthem, Chairman Mao solemnly declared the founding of new China, I felt so exhilarated that I forgot about the danger and leaned as far out from the rostrum guardrails as I could and took a photo of Chairman Mao as he declared the rising of the new nation."

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