The shape-shifting nature of photography and its history in China make both subjects constantly moving targets. Since its arrival in the mid-nineteenth century, the uses of photography in China have been various and heterogeneous, its products numerous yet widely scattered, its archives spotty and imperfectly preserved. Nevertheless, the entwinement of photography with China's modern past has spurred increasing interest in recent years on a popular and academic level, emphasizing the need for an English-language history of Chinese photography despite the considerable challenges involved. Claire Roberts's Photography and China is thus a brave and welcome undertaking, and the author succeeds in providing a thoughtful and thought-provoking history of photography produced in China.
As can be seen from its title, the book makes no claim for one essentializing history of Chinese photography. Instead, Roberts's approach is appropriately thematic. (Photography and China is part of Reaktion's theme-based series on photographic history.) In addressing photography as an ever-changing set of visual practices embedded within larger cultural frameworks, the book investigates the relationship between photography and China as a series of encounters. Photography thus is identified as technology, medium, reproduced image, and artwork, while China becomes nation and culture, subject and object, producer and audience.
The premise of history is not lost. Photography in China is inseparable from the country's volatile modern history, and any history of the medium does double duty in representing China's recent social and political past as well as conveying photography's own complicated development as a visual and cultural practice. Photography and China provides for both by using a chronological and topical organization, built on a careful selection of images.
Each of the book's seven chapters addresses a time-span of several decades by focusing on the dominant applications of photography within each period, beginning with the arrival of photography in China as an accompaniment to the colonizing forays of Western powers during the 1840s and concluding with the global presence of Chinese contemporary art photography. This organization allows for a sensible and nuanced series of mini-narratives that deftly juggle an ever-changing cast of practitioners, subjects, venues, and viewers. Of particular note is the balance struck between photography's transnational and indigenous identities. Roberts succeeds in conveying the flow of photographers and images into and out of China, while also capturing the adaptation of photography to local conditions and traditions. The larger result is a set of compelling accounts of the place of photography in China, whether its production of journalistic and tourist images of China, its embrace by the worlds of publishing and mass media as document and entertainment, its uses as political record or propaganda, reportage and performance piece, or its adoption for private images that assert new forms of modern identity.
As well as elucidating the remarkably diverse functions of photography over time, Roberts's history of photography in China always keeps in sight the particular image. There are few authoritative histories of Chinese photography, and none attempts as complete an overview; certainly none includes such a bracing span of images. The author has cast an appropriately wide net. With her still concise choice of 141 pictures, Roberts proposes a canon of landmark photographs, and her selection is notably even-handed in its variety. They include famous images, such as Felice Beato's 1860 picture of the Chinese dead at Dagu Fort and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah's 1989 Tank Man (illus. 6, 110), but a good number are less well known, even unknown, which often only adds to their impact. Such images include one of a student gleefully roller-skating past a towering Chairman Mao statue from Liu Heung Shing's 1981 series China After Mao, and Ye Qianyu's gloriously abstract construction New Home of 1936 (illus. 1, 67). In markedly different ways, all of these examples capture with startling vividness a real moment in time, period aesthetics, and pictorial trends, as well as larger historical issues. Roberts's pithy discussion of each image further succeeds in conveying its significance as both picture and document, in a judicious combination of fact and analysis. One could quibble with some of the author's choices, but the book's most significant contribution may be that it brings this proffered canon together with multiple narratives that jointly demonstrate the exciting complexities and possibilities inherent to the history of photography in China.
Photography and China offers an excellent and accessible introduction to its topic and will prove informative and rewarding for general reader and specialist alike. Any good survey leaves readers wanting more. The book's helpful footnotes and bibliography may still leave specialists in particular wishing for even more information on archival and other primary sources than it is perhaps possible to provide in an introductory overview. Similarly, canons and survey texts are meant to be challenged, and Roberts's chapter on contemporary art photography especially takes her into divisive territory where history is still being written, and not all will agree with her selection of images. However, these are minor points. The clarity and intelligence of Photography and China serve its subjects well, and will inspire readers to pursue further the many avenues of inquiry the book opens up.
