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

Bridget AlsdorfProblems of Perspective in Chinese Documentary Photography

The ethics of perspective are central to Orientalism, both

to its images and to its theorization. Westerners are accus-

tomed 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 documen-

tary photography in China by Chinese photographers offers a

wealth of material to investigate this question. In particu-

lar, 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 rela-

tionship 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.

D. J. ClarkFamine and Barefoot Children

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 ref-

erence 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.

Abstracts

James ElkinsDocumentary Photography Projects: Some Observations

This is an informal paper, reporting on five documentary pho-

tography projects: (1) a large-scale initiative, based in

Bergen, Norway, to identify 19th-century Norwegian immi-

grants 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,” includ-

ing 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 depart-

ment; and (5) a project in the Jacobs-University, Bremen,

aimed at classifying news photographs according to a catego-

ries 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.

Eliza HoSha Fei and the Beginning of Chinese Social Documentary Photography

In the beginning of the 1930s, most Chinese fine-art photogra-

phers saw photography as a personal pursuit for art and plea-

sure. 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 social-

political 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 exhibi-

tions to disseminate social critique embedded in their photo-

graphs, 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 propo-

nents, 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 work-

ing definition of what one might call Chinese social documen-

tary photography.

Richard K. KentReclaiming Documentary Photography

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 prom-

ise 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 prac-

tice 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 fac-

ets of society and lived experience. It will also examine more

closely the work of two photographers of the period whose pho-

tographs 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.

William SchaeferEcologies of Photographs

Among the most pervasive motifs in contemporary Chinese dis-

courses on documentary photography are those that conceptu-

alize photographs in spatial terms, as exploring and depicting

“ecologies” and “environments.” Wang Zheng’s grainy photo-

graphs 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 docu-

mentary 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 under-

stood 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 glo-

balization, mass migration, and displacement.

Jerome SilbergeldChina Seen by the Chinese: Documentary Photography, 1951 – 2003

What is documentary photography, what does it document, and

how is it different from other genres of photography (art

photographs, 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 some-

thing, 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 rep-

resentative 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.

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 publica-

tions are an article on Nicolas Poussin and 17th-century alle-

gory, and an essay on the work of contemporary artist Andrea

Hornick. An article on Cézanne’s late still lifes is forth-

coming 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.

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 photo-

journalism, 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 journal-

ist. He researches and writes about photography as a vehicle

for social change, the subject that drives both his photo-

graphic 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 key-

note speech at the World Press Photo Awards on the growth of

Majority World Photojournalism.

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

Conference Participants

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).

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 pol-

itics. 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 spe-

cial 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 sched-

uled to open in January 2010 at the Ohio State University’s

Urban Arts Space.

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).

William Schaefer teaches modern Chinese literary and cul-tural 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 cur-

rently researching the intersection of rural-urban migration

and historical traces in contemporary Chinese photography,

a well as the relationships between abstraction and docu-

mentary in recent Chinese, Japanese, and Western photog-

raphy. 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 cri-

tique entitled, titled “Photography’s Places” (forthcoming).

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 contempo-

rary 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 aes-

thetics of old age, perceptions and misperceptions of histor-

ical 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 politi-

cal censorship. Among his books, edited volumes, and exhi-

bition 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).