Chen Man: Works 2003–2010. Text by Liu Heung Shing & Karen Smith. Hong Kong: 3030 Press, 2010. 154 p. ISBN 9789889938420. Chen Man is a young Beijing-based photographer whose photos have appeared in Chinese and Western magazines, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire. From the publisher’s website: “Chen Man: Works 2003–2010 is the first survey of Chen Man’s career and spans the entire range of her work, from her earliest cover shoots to new, as-yet unpublished images. Articles by Karen Smith and Liu Heung-shing place the artist’s work in context and provide an insight into the artist’s working processes and inspiration [3030press.com/book/08/].”

Liu Heung Shing, Yi jiu yi yi: cong ya pian zhan zheng dao jun fa hun zhan de bai nian ying xiang shi=壹玖壹壹 : 從鴉片戰爭到軍閥混戰的百年影像史 [1911: A 100-year history in photographs, from the Opium War to the Warlord Era]. Hong Kong: Shang wu yin shu guan 商務印書館, 2011. 413 pp. ISBN 9789620755903. Published to coincide with the centennial of China’s 1911 revolution that ended millennia of imperial rule.

Liu Heung Shing, Mao Yihou de Zhongguo 1976–1983=毛以后的中国1976–1983 [China After Mao, 1976–1983]. Beijing: Shi jie tu shu chu ban gong si Beijing gong si 世界图书出版公司北京公司, 2011. 220 pp. ISBN 9787506295222. This is a selection of some 200 of Liu’s photos depicting daily life in China following the death of Mao Zedong. A number of the images hint at the development of a consumer society and the demystification of the Chairman. Included is a photo of Jiang Qing, Mao’s defiant widow, in chains at her trial.

James Z. Gao, “Shooting Social Suffering: Photography and China’s Human Disasters,” The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (Fall 2011), p. 99–124.

Sebastian Dobson and Sven Saaler, eds., Under Eagle Eyes: Lithographs, Drawings and Photographs from the Prussian Expedition to Japan, 1860–61. Munich: Iudicium 2011. 392 pp. ISBN 983862051373. Published in time to commemorate 150 years of relations between Germany and Japan, this record of a little-known German mission to a Japan little known in the West. The mission included scientists, artists, and a photographer, all of whom spent five months in Japan documenting what they saw. “Much of this official iconography is presented to modern readers here for he first time, with accompanying essays and notes to provide helpful context [Source: The Japan Times Online, Jan. 1, 2012].”

Jakob Carlsen, Outcast: The Repressed People of Asia. [S.l.: Ajour; dist. in the U.S. and Canada by IPG, 2011. 196 pp. ISBN 8792241220.

Images of Singapore. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011. 140 pp. ISBN 9789814328654.

Wei-Cheng Lin, “Preserving China: Liang Sicheng’s Survey Photos from the 1930s and 1940s,” Visual Resources, vol. 27, issue 2 (2011; Special Issue: Intersection of Photography and Architecture), pp. 129–145. From the author’s abstract: “In an endeavor to write a history of traditional Chinese architecture during the 1930s–1940s, Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) employed photography as the primary method of visual documentation because of its alleged ability to represent reality objectively. This article reexamines Liang’s survey photographs in light of the different interests in China’s cultural past taken by the state and foreign powers. In particular, by comparing photographs taken by Japanese architectural historians, whose research in China informed and justified Japan’s intention to construct a Japan-centered Pan-Asianism, I argue that Liang’s images of ancient buildings not only helped define China’s cultural heritage, but also evoked a nostalgic view of the past—a vision, to Liang, to be the only means of preserving China’s architectural tradition during the most tumultuous years in modern China.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, Private Passion: The Photographs of Pioneer Politician and Diplomat S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011. 120 pp. ISBN 9789814311434

Liew Suet Fun, and S. C. Shekar, Our Land Within: Passages Through Southeast Asian Communities. Petaling Jaya: Beagle Books, 2011. 224 pp. ISBN:  9789671016909. Documentary photographs (Shekar) and texts (Liew) illustrating the commonalities of Southeast Asian peoples, covering, inter alia, music, cuisine, faith, spaces, ethnic groups, and communities.

Gu Zheng, Contemporary Chinese Photography=中国当代摄影艺术 . Beijing: China Youth Press 中国青年出版社, 2011。ISBN: 0956288065. The art critic Gu Zheng presents commentary on contemporary Chinese photography and photographers.

Liam Kennedy, “‘A Compassionate Vision’: Larry Burrow’s Vietnam War Photography,” Photography and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2 (July 2011), pp. 179–194. From the author’s abstract: “During the Vietnam War, photojournalists had opportunities to develop a fresh visual awareness about war and its representations, especially those who stayed for long periods. This article focuses on Life magazine photographer Larry Burrows whose work constitutes both a remarkable documentary chronicle of the conflict and a subjective register of his own shifting perspectives. The evolution of his work over nine years in Vietnam illustrates some of the tensions—subjective and professional—that attend the role of the photographer-as-witness. Burrows’s efforts to construct a ‘compassionate’ point of view in his work reflect moral ambiguities of this role.”

Maki Fukuoka, “Selling Portrait Photographs: Early Photographic Business in Asakusa,” History of Photography, vol. 35, issue 4 (2011), pp. 355–373. Author’s abstract: “This article offers a case study of the process that shaped popular understanding of photographic practice, technology and images in early Meiji (1868–88) Japan. Specifically, I argue that the neighbourhood of Asakusa—a space already codified as one of transformation and performance, of ‘play and prayer’—lent itself to the business of photographic studios and provided a rich backdrop to the dynamic production and consumption of photographic objects that were unlike those found elsewhere in the new capital of Tokyo.”

Ariadne van de Ven, “The Eyes of the Street Look Back: In Kolkata with a Camera Around my Neck,” Photographies, vol. 4, issue 2, 2011, pp. 139–155. On photography by tourists. From the abstract: “The essay has three parts: the cultural baggage that many tourists have internalized, my own unexpected experiences in the street, and the political implications of re-appraising the tourists, the interactions, and photographs.”

Zahid R. Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth Century India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012 [forthcoming]. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-7749-8. The author is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University. The following description is taken from the University of Minnesota Press website: “Afterimage of Empire provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, Zahid R. Chaudhary explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment.”

Miyako Ishiuchi, Sweet Home Yokusuka, 1976–1989. New York: PPP Editions/Andrew Roth, 2010. ISBN 9780971548091. Combines three of the photographer’s earlier works into one: Apartment (1978), Yokosuka Story (1979), and Endless Nights (1981).

Material & Idea: Chinese Photography History 1840s–2011=史料 .史识摄影术传入至今的中国摄影书写. Gao Chu 高初 and Du Lin 杜琳, editors. [S.l.: s.n., 2011]. Papers in Chinese or English from a conference in Jiangsu, China, distributed only to participants and selected others. See http://www.chinesephotography.org/?p=931

Eleanor M. Hight, Felice Beato, Photographer in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Selections from the Tom Burnett Collection. With contributions by Tom Burnett and Terry Bennett. Durham, NH: The Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, 2011. vi, 58 pp. ISBN 978-0-615-51415-4. Catalog of an exhibition.

Eleanor M. Hight, Capturing Japan in Nineteenth Century New England Photography Collections. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 226 pp. ISBN 9781409404989. Summary (from the publisher): “Expanding the canon of photographic history, Capturing Japan in Nineteenth Century New England Photography Collections focuses on six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in late nineteenth-century Boston. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes. The first history of its kind, this study illuminates the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers.”

Richard K. Kent, “Fine Art Photography in Republican Period Shanghai: From Pictorialism to Modernism,” in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen. C. Fong. Princeton, NJ: Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, vol. II, pp. 849–874.

Jerome Silbergeld, “Photography Goes to the Movies: On the Boundaries of Cinematography, Photography and Videography in China” in Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen. C. Fong. Princeton, NJ: Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, vol. II, pp. 875–908.

Susie Protschky, “Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life: Picturing Domesticity in Elite European and Javanese Family Photographs from the Netherlands Indies, ca. 1900–42,” History of Photography, 36:1, 44–65 (Feb. 2012).

Four Dimensions: Contemporary Photography from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. Catalog of the highlight exhibition of the Hong Kong Photo Festival 2010, held at the Hong Kong Arts Center and organized by the Hong Kong Photographic Culture Association.

The Road to China’s 1911 Revolution=走向辛亥革命之路. HK: Hong Kong Museum of History, 2011. 176 pp. ISBN 978-962-7039-68-6. Catalog of an exhibition. Contains many rarely-seen photographs of people and events leading up to the 1911 Revolution and the years following the Revolution, along with many other graphic images (posters, school certificates, magazine covers, etc.). The photographs are drawn from archives in the U.S., China, Hong Kong, Australia, England, and other places and illustrate the nine chapters. Bilingual (Chinese and English).

Lisa Sutcliffe, “Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s,” Photography and Culture, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 111–115. Review of a book by Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian published by Aperture 2009.

Filip Suchomel and Marcela Suchomelová, ed., ...And the Chinese Cliffs Emerged Out of the Mist: Perception and Image of China in Early Photographs. [Prague?]: Arborvitae, 2011. 296 pp. ISBN 978-80-86164-47-1. It appears that there are editions in both Czech and English. “One part of the book is a comprehensive catalogue with detailed descriptions of 125 photographs from the collections of t he Moravian natives Erwin Dubsky and Heinrich Wawra who visited China in the 180s and the 1870s and acquire important collections of Chinese albumin [sic] images in the local photographic studios from European and Chinese photographers [from www.arborvitae.eu/en/publishers].”

Enno Kapitza, Wo das Herz ist: Fotografien aus Japan und Deutschland 1990–2010. Munich: Iudicium, 2011. 176 pp. ISBN: 978-3-86205-088-8. Kapitza graduated from the State Academy for Photo Design in Munich. He is a son of Japanese and German parents and grew up in both countries. This book, which has minimal text (in German and Japanese) juxtaposes photos taken in Japan with photos taken in Germany.