[2] She and her future husband, Xu Xiaobing, then a PLA photographer, met in Yan'an in early 1942 and he introduced her to photography.

Work assignments separated the couple for long periods of time, but Hou studied photography with Japanese prisoners.

[2] Hou's photo of Mao and other new leaders on 1 October 1949, proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic of China is one of the most widely distributed photographs of modern times, but she also took less formal pictures of the leadership.

By one count, although she was the only woman on the film crew, Hou Bo took more than 400 of the 700 officially published photographs of Mao in this period.

[2] She and Xu Xiaobo became, as one China watcher put it, "court photographers" who took photos both of Mao in "Stalinesque" poses that became famous propaganda posters, and also relaxed pictures of him with his family, some on the beach at Beidaihe.

[5] Her assignment was to make a photographic record not only of Mao, but of Central Committee members including Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Liu Shaoqi.

She travelled with these officials and often caught them in unguarded moments, such as "Chairman Mao at Work on an Aeroplane" (1957), which showed him intent on reading a document.

She shows Mao wearing a straw hat that "seems to accentuate the effect of an Emperor of Nature, radiating rays of sunlight".