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2. China Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951 – 2003

An international symposium in conjunction with the exhibition “Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography” on view at the China Institute, New York, from 24 September – 13 December 2009 Saturday, 24 October 2009, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, Helm Auditorium, McCosh 50. Princeton University

Organized by the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang, Center for East Asian Art. Summaries courtesy of the Tang Center for East Asian Art, Princeton University.

Abstracts

"Problems of Perspective in Chinese Documentary Photography," Bridget Alsodorf

The ethics of perspective are central to Orientalism, both to its images and to its theorization. Westerners are accustomed to images of the East filtered through Western eyes, but is perspective – in all of its conceptual and physical dimensions – still a problem when those images represent an “ insider’s” point of view? Of course. But how? Recent documentary photography in China by Chinese photographers offers a wealth of material to investigate this question. In particular, a number of photographs in the China Institute exhibition thematize and interrogate perspective within the frame of the image, displaying a striking self-consciousness – on the part of the photographers as well as their subjects – of the relationship between desire, power, the human body, and frames of vision. This presentation will look closely at several of these photographs, and will consider them in relation to the work of three other photographers known for their images of the “new China”: German Thomas Struth, Brazilian Sebastião Salgado, and Chinese-American Mark Leong.

Bridget Alsdorf is assistant professor of 19th-century European art at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D.in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley, after spending two years as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington. Her most recent publications are an article on Nicolas Poussin and 17th-century allegory, and an essay on the work of contemporary artist Andrea Hornick. An article on Cézanne’s late still lifes is forthcoming in Word & Image, and another on Fantin-Latour will soon appear in The Getty Research Journal. The latter relates to her book manuscript, The Art of Association: Fantin-Latour and the Modern Group Portrait, which examines the resurgence of group portraiture in 19th-century France, with a particular focus on problems of isolation and collectivity.

"Famine and Barefoot Children," D.J. Clark

Printed in the upper left corner of page 440 of the Humanism in China catalogue is Li Feng’s picture of “bare-foot children in rags on the farm.” It is the collection’s only coded reference to a famine that engulfed the country in 1958 – 62, a humanitarian disaster that is widely regarded as the world’s worst, yet one that seemingly passed unrecorded by China’s growing cohort of photographers. This paper discusses Li Feng’s image in relation to a gradual development of Chinese photographic culture and argues that, although the picture does not fit a Western tradition of imaging famine, it was read very differently within the context of photography seen by the audience of the time.

D. J. Clark, who is employed by the University of Bolton in the U.K. and represented by Panos Pictures in London, works as leader of the M.A. photography course (international photojournalism, travel, and documentary photography) in Dalian, China; as director of Visual Journalism at the Asia Center for Journalism in Manila; and as a free-lance multimedia journalist. He researches and writes about photography as a vehicle for social change, the subject that drives both his photographic and academic work. In 2003/4 he took a year’s leave from teaching to write a research paper on 1950s Chinese photo journalism, a study that led to his moving permanently to China in 2006. Clark runs workshops throughout the world, most recently for Xinhua in Beijing; the British Council in Croatia, Mozambique, and Vietnam; and World Press Photo in the Philippines and throughout Africa. In 2008 he gave a keynote speech at the World Press Photo Awards on the growth of Majority World Photojournalism.

"Documentary Photography Projects: Some Observations," James Elkins

This is an informal paper, reporting on five documentary photographyprojects: (1) a large-scale initiative, based in Bergen, Norway, to identify 19th-century Norwegian immigrants to the U.S.; (2) a collection of photographs of Estonia, from the 19th century to the present; (3) a project to study the “lingchi,” the Chinese “death of a thousand cuts,” including a forthcoming book on the subject; (4) a project in the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Basel, to articulate a theory of documentary photography in a visual communications department; and (5) a project in the Jacobs-University, Bremen, aimed at classifying news photographs according to a categories devised by Marion Mueller and based on earlier categories invented by Aby Warburg and Martin Warnke. The paper will present aspects of all five projects, with the purpose of providing some frames for problems that currently present themselves in the study of documentary photography.

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He writes on art and non-art images; his recent books include Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003), What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003), On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (2004), and Master Narratives and Their Discontents (2005). He has edited two book series for Routledge: The Art Seminar (conversations on different subjects in art theory) and Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (short monographs on the shape of the 20th century). He is currently organizing a seven-year series of seminars for the Stone Summer Theory Institute (stonesummertheoryinstitute.org).

"Sha Fei and the Beginning of Chinese Social Documentary Photography," Eliza Ho

In the beginning of the 1930s, most Chinese fine-art photographers saw photography as a personal pursuit for art and pleasure. They commonly depicted subject matter conventional to traditional Chinese painting, such as landscape and genre scenes. Although some photographers looked beyond the usual range of topics, focusing their attention on working people and the lower classes, their aim remained to make artistic photographs. Toward the mid-1930s a new trend emerged. This new trend, stemming partly from the deteriorating socialpolitical conditions in China, called for photographers to use their medium to effect social change. In response to this call, some photographers began to use the forum of exhibitions to disseminate social critique embedded in their photographs, establishing for themselves an identity of patriotic, concerned photographers. This paper traces the origin of this new trend first by examining the writings of its proponents, such as He Tiehua and Sha Fei, and then by analyzing a series of Sha Fei’s photographs collectively called Mass Life (Dazhong shenghuo), which were shown in the photographer’s 1937 solo exhibition. Finally, it attempts to provide a working definition of what one might call Chinese social documentary photography.

Eliza Ho received her academic training as an art historian in Hong Kong and the U.S. The experience of growing up in Hong Kong has made her particularly aware of issues such as cultural identity and the dynamics between national and regional politics. Her master’s thesis explores the stereotyping of the Lingnan School, a regional school of modern Chinese painting whose impact and importance, she concludes, extended beyond its presumed regional boundaries. Her recent research on Chinese wartime photography, and on Sha Fei (1912 – 1950), the first photojournalist working for the Chinese Communist Party and the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation, reflects her special interest in investigating photography’s role in China’s nation-building project and identity formation during the 1930s and 1940s. Ho is currently organizing an exhibition on Sha Fei titled Art, Documentary, and Propaganda in Wartime China: The Photography of Sha Fei (1912 – 1950), which is scheduled to open in January 2010 at the Ohio State University’s Urban Arts Space.

"Reclaiming Documentary Photography," Richard K. Kent

Paralleling the growing interest in the history of Chinese photography in general, historians, critics, and curators in China have begun to focus on the resurgence of what has been termed documentary photography (jishi sheying). From the early 1980s onward, concurrent with the transformation of China into a more open society with a market-driven economy, there has been an outpouring of activity by photographers concerned with documenting widespread socio-economic change. This relatively unfettered photographic documentation, which has turned its back on the decades-long propagandistic use of the medium in the service of social realism during Mao Zedong’s rule, may be seen as the delayed burgeoning of seeds of promise for a documentary photographic practice planted during the Republican period. This paper’s objective is twofold. It will examine aspects of amateur fine-art photographic practice in the 1930s that reflected a documentary orientation and laid the foundation for the use of the camera as a means of bringing attention to often ignored or little-known facets of society and lived experience. It will also examine more closely the work of two photographers of the period whose photographs and writings have only recently been rediscovered and publicized: Zhuang Xueben (1909 – 1984), who from 1934 to 1937 worked in present-day Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu with an ethnographic interest in documenting the region’s non- Chinese peoples; and Fang Dazeng (1912 – 1937), whose brief career as a photojournalist in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi province in 1932 through 1937 was cut short by his untimely death shortly after the start of the war with Japan. Both of these photographers, along with Sha Fei (1912 – 1950) and Zhang Zudao (1922), are being elevated to the status of canonical exemplars of early Chinese documentary photography. This paper considers the rationale for their newfound significance.

Richard K. Kent is professor of art history at Franklin & Marshall College, where he teaches East Asian art history and the history of photography. He has published articles on various facets of medieval Chinese painting, especially the Buddhist subject of luohans (senior disciples of the Buddha)from the Song to the Ming dynasties. His current research concerns early-20th-century Chinese photography, and he is publishing a series of articles on this topic, including “Fine-Art Amateur Photography in Republican-Period Shanghai: From Pictorialism to Modernism” (forthcoming in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong). He recently co-edited, with Christopher Zhu, Embracing the Uncarved Wood: Sculptural Reliefs from Shandong, China (2009), the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition that opened at Franklin & Marshall’s Phillips Museum of Art, then moved to Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. In his role as a photographer, he is the primary contributor of black-and-white photographs to Central Market: Cornerstone of the Lancaster Community, with text by Linda Aleci (2009).

"Ecologies of Photographs," William Schaefer

Among the most pervasive motifs in contemporary Chinese discourses on documentary photography are those that conceptualize photographs in spatial terms, as exploring and depicting “ecologies” and “environments.” Wang Zheng’s grainy photographs of displaced Muslim communities in western China, with their intense attention to the textures and markings of an arid landscape, have been described as exploring a “human ecology.” Lu Yuanmin’s photographs exploring memory in Shanghai, composed of smudges and blurs of light and shadow, have been noted for their attention to urban “props” and “scenes” and their often dilapidated surfaces. And Jiang Jian insists on the terms “scene” and “environmental portrait” to characterize his richly-lit color photographs depicting rural domestic interiors as collections of migrating images and objects worn with use. Such motifs of ecology and environment conceptualize the relations between, on the one hand, the material practices of photography, and, on the other, the pervasive focus of documentary photographs on the interactions of peoples, objects, images, and places, and the markings on surfaces left by the passage of people and time. Together the material practices and thematic concerns of documentary photography are understood as composing complex mediums of history, culture, and memory. This paper examines these disparate photographers’ ecological and environmental conceptions of documentary, and suggests that such conceptions are inseparable from one of the central concerns of contemporary Chinese photography: the changing meanings of place at a historical moment of globalization, mass migration, and displacement.

William Schaefer teaches modern Chinese literary and cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has completed a book manuscript titled “Shadow Modernism: Photography and Writing in Shanghai, 1925 – 1935” and is currently researching the intersection of rural-urban migration and historical traces in contemporary Chinese photography, a well as the relationships between abstraction and documentary in recent Chinese, Japanese, and Western photography. His publications include “Poor and Blank: History’s Marks and the Photographies of Displacement,” forthcoming in Representations; “Shadow Photographs, Ruins, and Shanghai’s Projected Past,” in PMLA 122:1 (2007); and “Shanghai Savage” (positions: east asia cultures critique 11:1 (2003). He has also edited a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled, titled “Photography’s Places” (forthcoming).

"China Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951 – 2003," Jerome Silbergeld

What is documentary photography, what does it document, andhow is it different from other genres of photography (artphotographs, news photography, photojournalism, snapshots)? What does it have to do with art and aesthetics? These are questions with many answers but no consensus, whether in China or in the West. Every photograph documents something, or a number of things, including its own act of documentation, and so the term “documentary” might be so broad as to be meaningless. But that is only the beginning of an inquiry, as the term itself remains in widespread use. This paper presents the term “documentary photography” from the point(s) of view of the Chinese curators of this exhibition. It describes their basis for selecting 600 representative photographs for the first museum collection of its kind in China, and it discusses the selection of 100 of these photographs for the China Institute exhibition.

Jerome Silbergeld is P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art at Princeton University and director of Princeton’s Tang Center for East Asian Art. His teaching and publications are in the area of traditional and contemporary Chinese painting, Chinese gardens and architecture, and Chinese cinema. In his teaching and in more than fifty articles and book chapters, he has dealt with such topics as artistic tradition in times of political upheaval, the aesthetics of old age, perceptions and misperceptions of historical change, “bad” art and the articulation of the negative, the historically unstable identity of “China” and its impact on the writing of art history, regional diversity in Chinese gardens, and visual communication in a culture of political censorship. Among his books, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues are Chinese Painting Style (1982), Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang (1987), Chinese Painting Colors (1989), Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (1993), China Into Film (1999), Hitchcock With a Chinese Face (2004), Persistence/ Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing (2005), Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (2008), and Outside In: Contemporary °— Chinese °— American Art (2009).

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