Shooting Statues: "The Chairman and I"

Photographer Andre Eichman has been travelling around China on and off for the last six years, carrying with him a kitsch little statue of Mao Zedong. Along the way he’s been taking pictures of the people he met, and speaking to them about what the Chairman now means to them.

An exhibition of his work, “The Chairman and I,” opens in Shanghai on December 6. Here he explains how you go from shooting for Vogue to almost getting arrested in a Dalian shipyard.

CNNGo: Where did the idea for “The Chairman and I” come from?

It initially started as a light-hearted side project, but that all changed when I went to visit my father during Christmas 2003. He was living in Ganzhou, teaching at a medical college after he had retired. While there, I was introduced to a handful of ex-soldiers who recounted their time during the fight for liberation. And one of my father's coworkers knew General Gu Ping, who’d served as a bodyguard to Zhou Enlai’s wife during the Long March.

After he heard about my project with the Chairman, he told me stories of the hardship he’d encountered -- he had to hold on to the tail of Zhou’s wife’s horse, just to make it up a mountain -- that were so moving that I knew I had to take the project a bit more seriously.

CNNGo: How did you decide to take the statue of Mao with you?

The first Mao (I went through three of them) was picked up in Shanghai, at the Dongtai Lu antique market [Dongtai Lu, near Ji'an Lu 东台路, 近吉安路]. At first I didn't know there were so many Chairmen to choose from. I didn't want a glitzy over-the-top model though, I wanted a real meat-and-potato Mao that the people could identify with. So I settled on a standard issue Mao in a greenish-brown long jacket with his arm raised.

 

CNNGo: What did you tell people who asked what you were doing?

Sometimes I would say I was doing a project on the Chairman and ask if I could ask some questions and take a snap. A lot of the time, though, I would just snap the Chairman in a particular spot, wait for people to respond, and then offer to do a photo.

CNNGo: Did you run into any problems?

The closest call was probably last winter in Dalian. The police outside a ship-building yard insisted on seeing what I’d just shot. But I wasn't using digital, I was shooting black and white. They were very nice about it, but still needed to see what was on the film, so they called around and had the pictures developed. I was convinced the film would be ruined, but when it came back it had been processed perfectly. And we were off the hook.

CNNGo: What do you think people thought of you?

I was just a guy wandering around with a Mao statue. When I pulled the Chairman out, I was in many cases a friend to all.