In 1959 Caio Mario Garrubba made a long reportage in Mao's China, ten years after the founding of the People's Republic, eager to see the red China of the revolution and the millenary one of peasants and immense expanses of rice. In recent years, China has been a sought-after and almost unattainable destination for a Western photojournalist and he is the first to cross its borders after Cartier-Bresson. Garrubba immerses himself for forty days in the life of a people who welcome him with amazement and curiosity and who have fatigue in their eyes.
He captures people's lives, with that "street" photography in which he is a teacher: we are never faced with "thesis" stories, portraits of ideal types, figures chosen to prove an idea, but with educated men and women in the concreteness of their individuality, in the richness of their inner world, in their personal baggage of history.
His photographs recall the whole atmosphere of an instant, "images of an intuition", as Garrubba himself defines them.