The secret side of graduation photos
Source: Xinhua |
May 28, 2011, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CHINESE students are adept at all the routines of graduation ceremonies - they line up on stage, pose with standard smiles and have group photographs taken with their teachers seated in the front row.
Behind the scene, however, graduates are showing another side of themselves by creating bizarre pictures that would definitely stun their mentors.
Although it's still a month until this year's graduation season, pictures have begun appearing on the Internet showing costumed graduates imitating terrorists, mafia members, and ghosts to mark their crazy days in college.
"We've been low-key for four years, but not at graduation," Yao Xiafei, who collected these alternative graduation pictures on renren.com, a Chinese social networking site, said on the title of the album.
In one dramatic photograph, a young woman dressed in her graduation gown poses as a corpse hanging from a tree in a tongue-in-cheek protest at having too much homework.
In another photograph, said to be taken by some electromechanical majors, legions of male graduates surround their only female classmate, while gesturing as if proposing marriage.
In some liberal arts colleges where women are in the majority, male graduates are the recipients of similar treatment in photographs.
The increasingly bold and rebellious photographs have become an annual fashion show of college graduates, but are not without controversies.
Last year, a photo of female graduates displaying their uncovered legs to a male "inspector" caused a splash online and was deemed "a showcase of moral decline" by some tradition-minded Chinese.
Most netizens, however, cheered on these whims and said an indulgence on this once-in-a-lifetime occasion was nothing to apologize for. "The photos are so good that they almost make me regretful," said a netizen nicknamed "Yunfeiwanli." "I should have taken more exciting snapshots during those bygone years which can never be repeated."
Behind the scene, however, graduates are showing another side of themselves by creating bizarre pictures that would definitely stun their mentors.
Although it's still a month until this year's graduation season, pictures have begun appearing on the Internet showing costumed graduates imitating terrorists, mafia members, and ghosts to mark their crazy days in college.
"We've been low-key for four years, but not at graduation," Yao Xiafei, who collected these alternative graduation pictures on renren.com, a Chinese social networking site, said on the title of the album.
In one dramatic photograph, a young woman dressed in her graduation gown poses as a corpse hanging from a tree in a tongue-in-cheek protest at having too much homework.
In another photograph, said to be taken by some electromechanical majors, legions of male graduates surround their only female classmate, while gesturing as if proposing marriage.
In some liberal arts colleges where women are in the majority, male graduates are the recipients of similar treatment in photographs.
The increasingly bold and rebellious photographs have become an annual fashion show of college graduates, but are not without controversies.
Last year, a photo of female graduates displaying their uncovered legs to a male "inspector" caused a splash online and was deemed "a showcase of moral decline" by some tradition-minded Chinese.
Most netizens, however, cheered on these whims and said an indulgence on this once-in-a-lifetime occasion was nothing to apologize for. "The photos are so good that they almost make me regretful," said a netizen nicknamed "Yunfeiwanli." "I should have taken more exciting snapshots during those bygone years which can never be repeated."
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