PARTY, the new photobook by Cristina de Middel, follows on the enormous success of The Afronauts.

PARTY was conceived by Cristina after a first trip to China in 2012, undertaken in the aim of “making photography, of reacting with the camera to whatever caught my attention, without any attempt to explain or analyze.”

She returned “with a large series of photographs that were hard to classify and edit, since the only common denominator was my own astonishment.” PARTY is a photobook built on the foundation of Mao’s Little Red Book. It is a book with “new” quotations and a free spirit that somehow shows us what China is today. Cristina uses the skeleton of Mao’s little book—what used to be the “Bible” of the Chinese people—to create a particular narrative.

As Cristina herself puts it: “I decided to adapt this historic political statement to modern times by censoring and hiding the parts of the text that are no longer in force and highlighting some other redesigned sentences that, for me, form a more accurate portrait of the People's Republic of China in the twentieth-first century.”