Meticulously researched and beautifully produced, Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Media Culture is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on photography in China. A seasoned literary scholar, Shengqing Wu foregrounds the interaction between the poetic tradition and the photographic medium, emphasizing the aesthetics “generated from the movement of ‘in-between’ media practices” (p. 4). Following Wu's effort in her last book, Modern Archaics,Footnote ¹ which argues for the continued relevance of Chinese lyricism, this volume attempts to extend this relevance to the “center of the technological transformation and at the onset of mass media” (p. 25).

Photo Poetics consists of seven chapters grouped into three parts. The first part treats the fundamental questions underlying this volume. Chapter 1 examines writings on images of the multiplied self in portrait photography to illuminate how Buddhist and Daoist concepts merge illusion with verisimilitude. Chapter 2 continues the theme of viewing the self by focusing on inscriptions and poems written by sitters on their own photographic portraits.

Part two turns to the social and cultural life of photographic objects. Chapter 3 focuses on gift exchanges and the efforts to transform mass-produced photographic images into singular objects. Chapter 4 ties together the trope of the skull and the subject of the nude by pointing out recurring mechanics that enabled the production and consumption of daring visual effects and erotic images. Part three loosely connects the attempts and claims of photographing ghosts and deities with landscape photography anchored in the theme of longing for the past. The last chapter looks at the work of two contemporary artists as an epilogue.

The book presents astoundingly rich new primary materials. Even though many topics, such as photographs of the multiplied self, photographs of courtesans, spirit photography, have all received scholarly attention, Photo Poetics offers new discoveries. The biggest contribution of this volume lies in the large number of translations of inscriptions and poems, often in their entirety. Wu's translations are precise and lucid. This is no easy task considering the wide range of metaphors and references used by the late Qing and Republican writers. Wu's close readings patiently unpack this large body of writings, tracing the historical roots and evolutions of terms, metaphors, and tropes, which often span from ancient China to the early twentieth century.

The necessity and effectiveness of such close reading become most apparent when it challenges or complicates familiar arguments. One example is Wu's nuanced reading of Qiu Jin's poem on one of her photographic portraits in male attire. In contrast with the simplistic understanding of the well-known female revolutionary's feminist appropriation of male attire and hence social roles, Wu points out the hesitation and perplexity in an analysis so beautifully written that it is not dissimilar from the “aestheticizing of emotion and unity of language and feeling” (p. 26) that she tries to illuminate in this book. It is not surprising that some of the most remarkable and compelling interpretations the author offered concern women or the politics of gender, which is not an afterthought, or a few sections but a critical thread underlying Wu's inquiries.

In contrast with the studies on the relationship between photography and literature in other parts of the world, many of which explore how photography brought new ways of seeing and impacted literary imagination, Photo Poetics emphasizes lyricism—which Wu approaches as “one kind of transmediality” (p. 27)—and argues for a lyrical mode of seeing. Photo Poetics resonates with many previous studies on early photography in China, which conclude that Chinese photographers, sitters, and viewers engage with photography through preexisting ideas, social modes, and aesthetic preferences. But this volume is unequivocal in attributing the cultural specificity in Chinese photography to literary lyricism.

This disciplinary devotion to texts—their history, inner logic, and generative power—in this volume at times marginalizes other important questions. The lyrical tradition and sensitivity, if there is one, was often actively used to gain social capital and claim new authority. For instance, the author offers an erudite reading of the term xieyi (sketching ideas), a concept adopted and championed by amateur photographers, without attention to elite amateurs’ painstaking efforts to exclude commercial studios from using the term so that their lofty pursuit would not be tainted by studio photography. Without addressing the often very unpoetic motives of the continual adoption of poetic lyricism, this book misses the opportunity to use the photographic medium to critically reflect on whether specific aesthetic and emotional sensitivity is essentially based on a cultural tradition. After all, the many fascinating phenomena pointed out by the author—popularity among sitters to create multiplied self, reflection on morality and mortality triggered by portraits, superstitions that the camera could take away vital forces from sitters or could capture ghosts, desires to transform a reproducible photograph into a singular object through personal touches—all could find ample counterparts, not only in the more explored British and American contexts, but also in photography in Japan, Mexico, Egypt, and the list could go on. As Wu asks in the final chapter, “Does every tradition become secondhand through cultural memory and recycling? Is there any authenticity that can be reclaimed in the tradition? Or is the question itself subject to question?” (p. 270).