VIS 128E Photography and Asia: Books

Photography was introduced to China in the 1840s through the West's engagement in the Opium Wars and the subsequent reforms of Chinese statesmen. As a result, traditional modes of expression were dramatically transformed. Uncovered here is a captivating visual history of China during photography's first century, from the late Qing period to Republican Shanghai and wartime Chongqing. Chinese export painters learned and adapted the medium of photography by grafting the new technology onto traditional artistic conventions--employing both brush and shutter. Ultimately, both Chinese and Western photographers were witnesses to and agents of dynamic cultural change. The essays in this volume shed new light on the birth of a medium. Jeffrey Cody and Frances Terpak, together with Edwin Lai, discuss the medium's evolution, commercialization, and dissemination; Wu Hung examines the invention of a portrait style through the lens of Milton Miller; Sarah Fraser investigates how this style shaped China's national image; and Wen-hsin Yeh addresses the camera's role in Republican Shanghai and wartime Chongqing. The catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 8 to May 1, 2011.

In Developing Mission, Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space--tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.

In recent years Felice Beato (1832-1909) has come to be recognized as one of the major photographers of the nineteenth century, yet until now there has been no general survey of his singular life and work. Born in Venice, Italy, Beato came of age in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. As a young apprentice in 1856, he photographed the sites of the Crimean War, thereby launching a long and remarkably adventurous career. Over the next half century he would follow in the wake of the British Empire: Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; India, where he photographed the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny; and China, where he chronicled the Second Opium War. He spent some thirty years in Japan and Burma, where he was among the first commercial photographers at the time that these countries were starting to open to the West. The text includes an engaging narrative of his life and entrepreneurial career and a thought-provoking essay on Beato and the photography of war. There is a generous selection of his photographs, including panoramas and hand-colored Japanese studies, along with captivating period ephemera, lithographs based on his work, and humorous caricatures of the artist.

"This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition 'From Istanbul to Yokohama: The Camera meets Asia 1819-1900" at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Cologne, May 17 - September 7, 2014."--Colophon
Exhibition of 19th-century photographs of Asian locales and people collected by Adolf Fischer, founder of the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Cologne, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Includes bibliographical references

Emphasizing the medium's reception among several Chinese constituencies, this book explores photography's impact within new discourses on science, as well as its effects in social life, visual modernity and the media during China's transition from imperial to republican government. General knowledge and academic teaching of early modern Chinese visual culture stops short of fitting photography into the larger context of visual practices and theories. This study redraws the boundaries by making photography the central concern within changing priorities of visual representation and its functions during a period of major cultural and political change. No other study draws on such intimate familiarity with the early glamour of photography as science, commerce and communication in the various local conditions of China's cities and towns. Joining a body of critical writing that examines photography's histories outside the familiar confines of the West, this book looks beyond the tourist and imperialist gazes of photographer-adventurers from the Western powers and Japan. It defines instead the Chinese priorities of photographic vision that are abundantly evident in surviving photographs as well as in records as various as technical manuals and personal inscriptions. Local practices and local knowledge are the keys to explain the highly successful indigenization of a medium as globalizing as photography with reference to Chinese society's own terms and practices. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art and visual culture, the history of photography and Asian art.　

The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal reference source for the ever-changing field of photography. Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and scholars from across the globe, this book examines the medium's history, its central issues and emerging trends, and its much-discussed future. The collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and universal language; the perception of photography archives as burdens, rather than treasures; the continual technological development reshaping the field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more. One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

Closely examining staged images of Japanese femininity, this study centers on the mid-Meiji souvenir photography of Kusakabe Kimbei, approaching from the artist’s perspective while referencing his culture’s visual and traditional practices. The analysis attempts to construe visual material in its original context using various points of departure, including the sociocultural significance of the staged models, the visual display of the photographic models in relation to the visibility problem of Japanese women in Meiji visual media, and Kimbei’s visual encodings of Japanese femininity. By means of contextualized analysis, this survey seeks to illuminate the intricate structure of significations embedded on the visual plane, ultimately demonstrating how Kimbei’s female images present a locus of multilayered meanings.