William Schaefer's Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–1937 sheds new light on modern visual cultures and imaginations in interwar Shanghai. At its core, the book interrogates close relationships between urban modernity and ways of seeing in Republican China. Photography and photographic aesthetics, Schaefer argues, were vital in constructing, disseminating, and reifying modern Chinese identities. To produce photographic images was to participate in a transnational visual culture, simultaneously framed by local practices and global tropes. Moreover, critical thought about such images existed at the forefront of intellectual and artistic discourse in (and about) Shanghai's urban spaces.

Shadow Modernism’s greatest contribution to scholarship on Chinese visual culture is to foreground previously unexamined visual and literary practices as the grounds for modern cultural confluences between East and West. It is an exploration that is as challenging as it is multidimensional. The visually embedded “cultural politics of modernity” existed in a liminal space in contemporary imaginations of Republican China (p. 7). As Schaefer writes in the introduction, “images and ideas about images formed an unstable, fraught, and contested ground of debate about culture, the past, and modern China's place in the world in Shanghai” (p. 1). The multiple focal points for these debates emerge in Schaefer's close examinations of photographic reality and abstraction (chapters 1 and 2), “visual reality” in urban spaces and temporalities (chapters 3 and 4), and gender and race in mutable representations of “civilization” and “savagery” (chapter 5). In each case, he uncovers hitherto unexplored visual imaginations that motivated Chinese photographers, writers, and thinkers in their pursuit of the modern.

Schaefer demonstrates the ways in which individuals “on the ground” in Shanghai translated global modernist visualities while also producing (or interpreting) visual materials as embodiments of new urban culture. The book draws from an extensive cast of characters, including cartoonist and essayist Feng Zikai, aesthetic philosopher Zong Baihua, photographer Lang Jingshan, and other key figures in and beyond Republican China. In navigating these multiple translations of photographic aesthetics, Shadow Modernism breaks down text-image binaries to track the transmedia flows of images and ideas, from metropolitan street scenes to the pages of Liangyou Huabao. It weaves together compositional choices, pictorial publications, and photographic juxtapositions—exploring the semiotic interplay between literary thought and visual conceptions of time, space, and cultural essence. Most notably, Schaefer emphasizes contemporary engagements with image materiality, all too often excluded from other studies in lieu of an emphasis on photographers’ “identities and influences” (p. 16). The book thus effectively builds upon Marshall McLuhan's foundational approach to media (“the medium is the message”) to shed light on the experimental processes and intellectual negotiations that shaped Shanghai's visual culture.Footnote ¹

Schaefer's work strongly expands existing scholarship on Shanghai's urban spaces and visual production between the World Wars. Paul Pickowicz has written extensively on the vital roles of the city's prewar film industry in shaping Republican Chinese culture and national identities.Footnote ² Relatedly, Leo Ou-fan Lee traces modern commercial and material culture in interwar Shanghai, drawing examples from images in print publications and cinema.Footnote ³ Neither study, however, focuses on photographic visuality as the primary category of analysis. Shadow Modernism thus fills multiple gaps in and between these works while advancing the study of China's vernacular visual culture. It moves deftly from the micro (image contents and photographic surfaces) to the macro (urban identities and imaginations), while foregrounding the lenses that framed this history, figuratively and literally.

In considering physical lenses, the book could have benefited from further discussion of photographic technologies—that is, the cameras, equipment, and materials that shaped images before they arrived at the visible (printed) stage. The close reading of images by necessity privileges the “final” products; this raises questions about the equally fascinating but not readily discernable technological contexts. Examples of the photographic apparatus are tantalizingly referenced in a few places throughout the book (including brief mentions of Rolleiflex and Rolleicord cameras, Verichrome film, and Velox printing paper), but Schaefer is primarily concerned with the products of such cameras and films (pp. 34, 137).

On the other hand, the narrative is at times dominated by detailed descriptions of visual technique in relation to aesthetic meanings. While of interest to historian-photographers, this may test readers unfamiliar with specific technical processes, while leaving scholars of visual technologies wanting more about equipment engagement in the larger history. That said, this is not Schaefer's fault, but is due in some part to the multifaceted natures of photography itself—popularly oversimplified as “an art and a science.” The fragmentary characteristics of the book's sources also complicate the analysis. As Schaefer notes, “in the absence of records indicating how specific historical figures manipulated photographic materials and processes, what is abundantly available … is the information that can be inferred from close inspection of the composition, appearance, placement and juxtaposition of the photographs … and of the rhetoric of captions and other texts that accompany [them]” (p. 16). In this light, much future work—for which this study will be an indispensable reference—remains to be done in tracing visual meanings from image surface to shutter release (or vice versa).

Specialists and graduate students who are interested in modern Chinese visual culture will find this book a valuable resource for scholarship and teaching. As an interdisciplinary study illuminating the important roles of images and visual practices behind Shanghai's—and Republican China's—modern culture, Shadow Modernism succeeds brilliantly.