Shipping out to China in December 1947 with three ten-year-old German cameras and a plum assignment from Life magazine, Jack Birns was fulfilling a boyhood dream. The reality was something else: refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests photographed in difficult and often dangerous circumstances amidst the poverty, corruption, and chaos of an expanding civil war. By then the ruling Nationalist Party had been battling the Communist threat for more than two decades, and Birns focused his camera on the human drama unfolding as war pressed ever closer to the country's financial, cultural, and commercial capital. His effort to show China's misery up close ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life's archives. Printed here for the first time, they offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.

Seen through the lens of hindsight, Birns's photographs give us a sense not only of what China was like more than fifty years ago, but also of why the warfare, weariness, and desperation of the time proved such fertile soil for communist revolution. Today these everyday scenes of ordinary people—pedicab drivers, street vendors, bar girls, police, politicians, prisoners—tell a story of national resilience and dignity in the midst of enveloping poverty, repression, and fear. Birns's stark black and white photographs capture the dramatic end of an era, but they also look forward, letting us glimpse how Shanghai's past prefigures the city's commercial and cultural revival in the 1990s.

（美）傑剋・伯恩斯，美國《生活》雜誌攝影記者，在中國內戰的最後幾年被派往上海進行戰時報道。

1947年，當傑剋・伯恩斯作為美國《生活》雜誌攝影記者被派往上海的時候，正值中國內戰時期。上海這座曾經繁華的國際都市正處於貧睏、腐敗和混亂的包圍之中。不顧齣版人亨利・R.盧斯的反對，伯恩斯將他的老相機聚焦在戰亂中的普通人和他們的日常生活上，他在極其睏難和危險的情況下，拍下瞭難民、乞丐、兒童、妓女、士兵以及貧富懸殊的生活、街頭的行刑和市民的反抗，但當時這些照片許多都未獲準發錶。50多年後的今天，它們終於首次得以齣版。今天看來，伯恩斯拍攝的這些反映戰亂中普通人和普通生活的照片絕不普通，它們以靜態的視角記錄瞭一個時代的轉摺。