Chinese Photography Research Articles

Reform of Photography Education in Chinese Applied Universities in the Self-Media Era: Evidence from Responsible Persons in the Photography Major

Live streaming and short videos have become the most favored means of communication, and the prevalence of self-media has had a profound impact on traditional media industries, indirectly promoting reforms in Chinese photography education. This study delves into the current state of photography education in Chinese applied universities and the transformations undertaken in response to the challenges posed by self-media. The research covers the development status of university photography programs, the impact of live streaming and short videos on photography education, changes in teaching models, and the issues encountered during these reforms. Through in-depth interviews with heads and instructors of photography programs at five applied universities in China, and using NVIVO software for thematic analysis, the study examines the professional divisions, curriculum design, teaching methods, student employment rates, reform policies, and the challenges faced. The research finds that the prevalence of live streaming and short videos has had a positive impact on the dynamic imaging specialties within photography education, but has been detrimental to the static imaging specialties. Universities have actively reformed their teaching methods in response to market demands, yet still face challenges in integrating live streaming-related courses. This study provides the latest insights for practitioners in the Chinese self-media industry and offers valuable references for university policymakers and researchers.

A arte da fotografia na China: algumas observações sobre sua conotação estética

Abstract: Photography, as a tool, mainly presents the relationship between people and objects through the use of artistic elements, such as light, shadow and color in images. The creation of photography is an activity that requires inspiration and skills. It requires photographers to carefully and deeply observe and think about the overall structure of the work, in order to take good photos that are both artistic and thoughtful. The development and popularization of photography in today’s society cannot be underestimated for their impact on public aesthetics and humanistic thinking. This paper aims to analyze the aesthetic connotation of Chinese photography and explore its aesthetic standards and values. The philosophical thoughts in Chinese photography are explored, and their reflections and perspectives on life and society are analyzed. The relationship and mutual influence between aesthetic connotations and philosophical thoughts in Chinese photography are explored, and their significance and influence on photography works are analyzed, so as to better understand and appreciate the uniqueness of Chinese photography. Chinese photography is a unique and diverse form of artistic expression that reflects China’s rich cultural heritage and social development. By emphasizing harmony, the integration of painting elements, storytelling and appreciation of nature, Chinese photography provides a profound aesthetic experience and conveys deeper meanings of unity, tranquility, and the relationship between people and the environment.

Chinese Photography

Chinese Photography

Opening Up

This article analyzes photographs of the city of Nanjing collected in the last years of the nineteenth century by Robert Löbbecke (1852–1910), a German military captain and engineer working in service of Chinese military reforms by leaders of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Spanning almost three decades and including the earliest known dated photos of Nanjing, more than half of the large albumen prints in this collection can be attributed to Chinese photographers, including the local branch of Ouyang Shizhi's (1857–1932) Powkee studio. They offer rare insights into both the early work by this famous studio and early Chinese photography of place, focusing on a city that stood at the center of struggles over China's political and economic survival. As such, this collection offers exceptional terrain to explore relations of photography to place, identity, and power in nineteenth-century China. To unpack these relations, I analyze Löbbecke's collection as part of photography's multivalent encounters with the city in nineteenth-century China. I start with the photographic encounters with the Chinese city in the work and writings of Jules Itier (1802–1877) and John Thomson (1837–1921), and then explore what the Löbbecke collection reveals about the visions its photos made possible for their expatriate collector and for their Chinese makers and audiences, with a special focus on Ouyang Shizhi's Nanjing studio enterprise. I conclude with a reflection on a more recent moment when the photos collected by Löbbecke returned home a century after their making to participate in the telling of new kinds of urban histories.

Tradition, Transmediality, and Modernity: Representation of the Double in Chinese Modern Visual Culture

ABSTRACT Films featuring look-alikes with contrasting attributes played by the same actor or actress were prevalent in both Republican cinema before 1949 and contemporary Chinese-language cinema. This trope of doubling is a focal point of this article. To examine the distinctiveness of the Chinese cinematic double, this article looks back on the pictorial and conceptual paradigm of traditional Chinese painting, as well as the photographic technology of the late nineteenth century. The interaction between cultural and aesthetic conventions of Chinese painting and the imported modern technology played a significant role in configuring the double in Chinese photography. The uncanny magic of the mimetic technologies that created the perfect doubles of man, culminated in Chinese cinema in the 1920s and 1940s. While this article focuses primarily on the relationship between the trope of the double and the history of media, it also examines the themes, technologies, mimesis, and identity that were inextricably interwoven with the figure of the double. From painting to photography and on to film, the intermedial and historical journey of doubling reflects the emergence of visual regimes of modernity which changed the optical experience, transformed perceptions of the real, and challenged social ideas about class and gender.

Finding You Is My Courage: New Stories of Homecoming in Chinese Photography Since the 2000s

Homecoming has been a complex concept affecting Chinese people of every generation since ancient times. As China underwent accelerating urbanization from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, the landscape of urban and rural China witnessed unprecedented change. Out of sensitivity to the evolution of social landscape and the participants of the great migration from the countryside/towns to big cities, Chinese photographers of the late 1970s and the early 1980s took photographs with high self-consciousness and knowledge of the characteristics of the time. Against the backdrop of globalization, they continued with various endeavors on the “photography of social landscapes,” which emerged in world photography in the 1960s, recording the people and stories in their hometowns and offering a series of personalized works with distinctive local features. This article will focus on three representative photographers from this generation—Muge, Park Il-kwon, and Zhang Xiao—and their new stories of homecoming to discuss how photographers, during a period of significant changes in rural China, recreated the identity of individuals and their communities by capturing the social landscape and took it as a remedy for their identity anxiety as “internal migrants.”

Extension of Meanings: Text and Image in Contemporary Chinese Photographic Works

This essay focuses on an aspect of photographic practices that are often seen but seldom discussed in contemporary Chinese photography: the creative practices that focus on the relationship (e.g. complementarity and contrast) between text and image. Concerning the traditions of Chinese literati painting, contemporary semiotic theories from the West, and the development of narratologies, this essay examines the works of several contemporary photographic artists in China that combine text and image. More specifically, it focuses on the theoretical framework behind the diverse practices of the twenty-first century. It addresses three main topics: the traditions of Chinese literati painting (which includes poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seal carving), Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory and its application in the visual world, and the theories and paradigms of storytelling in the evolution of narratology into its newer form. In addition, the essay explores how text and image theories and paradigms of different origins exist in contemporary art practices, as well as how they have extended the meanings of these works through the complementarity and conflict between text and image.

Exhibition Review of The Story of Light and Shadow: 20th Century Chinese Photography from Huang Jianpeng's Collection

The following article reviews a collection of photography on view at an exhibition named The Story of Light and Shadow: 20th Century Chinese Photography from Huang Jianpeng's Collection at the National Art Museum of China. Though an exhibition on Chinese photography, it included a sizable collection of Tibet-related photographs taken by early Han Chinese photographers during the early 20th century. Through a brief review of existing scholarship on photography of Tibet and a close reading of the works of Zhuang Xueben, one of the earliest Han Chinese photographers who took photos in Tibetan regions, we see how images produced during the early 20th century in Tibet are coded with layered agencies and complex motivations. Preliminarily contextualizing Zhuang Xueben’s photo-taking aspirations, I argue that early photographers of Tibet are embodiments of complex, overlapping and if not yet incongruous motivations – a complication of their own independent perspectives and professional responsibilities under the larger contextual influence from the society and its aspirations.

The writing, transformation, and rewriting of photo archives in Chinese photography from the 1940s to date

In recent years, photographers around the globe have begun to break the conventional linear sequence in the construction of photographic texts, opting for a new wave that allows multiple narrative strategies of the real or the fictional. They fuse documents, historical photos, texts, and carefully-constructed images, taking viewers to times and places in the past, to boundaries that can or cannot be told. This kind of practice not only reflects the artists’ interest and urgent desire to delve into history but also reveals the space that has been opened for photographic practices by the richness of social and cultural environments in history. In China, the research on archival art and its phenomena have appeared continuously in recent years, but it is mostly written based the theories of western scholars, such as T. R. Schellenberg, Jacques Derrida, Michael Shanks and others, and lacks discussion on archives in the political, social and cultural context of modern and contemporary China. Based on my ongoing research on the historical narrative of contemporary Chinese photography, this paper will focus on the relationship between archives and photographic art in a broader context, examining the following three interrelated archival issues: the production, dissemination, and storage of public photo archives in the 1940s; the development of the resource structure of photo archives in the recent past; and the different methods of transforming photo archives into works of art in contemporary Chinese photography.

The Middle Ground of Early Chinese Photography

The Middle Ground of Early Chinese Photography

Western Interactions and Influences

Based on archival research and interviews, this study examines the history of Chinese photography's interaction and engagement with the West between 1978 and 1988, and argues that these transnational encounters provided inspiration to Chinese photographers in their resistance to isolation and propaganda, two legacies from the Mao era. If in the artistic realm, the media's intensive introduction of Western works diversified the genres and styles of Chinese photography, in the journalistic field, Western exhibitions and training propelled Chinese news photographers to reconsider their professional role and social responsibility.

Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media

Life and Dreams: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Media

The Influence of Intelligent Technology on Photography Technology and Art

Along With the rapid development of social economy, intelligent technology has achieved remarkable achievements in photography, and the Chinese photography has exerted a great influenceon the development. At the end of the century 20 electronic age, the development of video art has been beyond our expectation, all kinds of impossible have become possible, the boundaries between reality and virtual has become blurred, the boundary of the image art is difficult to define. In this time whis infinite possibility, it is worthy to study the future of photography. This article is based on the application of intelligent technology, through the smart technology to improve photography, such as by Angle positioning technology, two-dimensional scanning, three-dimensional molding, and the influence of intelligent technology on photography art.

Lost in Translation? Interpreting contemporary Chinese photography

Contemporary art by Chinese artists was, before the financial crash of 2008, one of the fastest growing areas of the art market. In the period 2000 to 2012 a substantial number of exhibitions and texts were dedicated to the art of those working with lens-based media. In this way “Contemporary Chinese Photography” has emerged as a subset of contemporary art from China. Despite the fact that much of what has been written in the last forty years about the politics of representation would suggest that it is unsound to have a category of art production determined by the makers’ ethnicity, there is a great deal of actual and symbolic investment in this particular branch of contemporary art. A dominant idea at work in much of the secondary literature that seeks to introduce Westerners to the subject is that in viewing these works we are learning something about modern China and its inhabitants. This article argues that if this art appears legible to us, then one reason for this is because it has been made so by its art world interpreters and, in the process, become market-friendly.

10th Lianzhou Foto Festival

LIANZHOU, CHINA NOVEMBER 21-DECEMBER 22, 2014 Ten years is a long time in the life of a photography festival. It indicates perseverance on the part of the festival's directors and backers. It also indicates the festival's acceptance in the greater world of photography festivals, such as within the Festival of Light organization. This is the umbrella organization of a dozen or so photography festivals of established international stature, of which some of the oldest are festivals in Arles, Houston, Braga, and Bratislava; many of these have existed for thirty or more years and have presented curated work and, often enough, regular portfolio reviews since their inception. In an era where, it seems, there is a festival in every village in France (where the Rencontres d'Arles, the grandmother of all photography festivals, was founded) and across Europe and the Americas (where every self-respecting city must have a "photography week"), it is important to pay attention to those festivals that have established themselves in other parts of the world. Culture has always been a marketing tool for cities, and countries for that matter, and it has also always been used by governments and organizations to showcase their strengths and put their best faces forward. One can well think of the great Expositions Internationales in Paris and London and the World's Fair in Chicago in the late 1800s, as well as the modern Olympic Games that, especially during the twentieth century, were signal public manifestations of governments' attempts to project their power through technological prowess, culture, or sport. Think Berlin 1936. Think Los Angeles 1984. More recently, think Beijing 2008. Think Sochi 2014. And so on. "What does this have to do with a photography festival?" one might well ask. Well, the projection of power through culture (or sport) that has manifested itself through events such as the Olympics is indeed part of the marketing of the modern state. Whereas Arles or Houston, for example, may celebrate transparency, democracy, and freedom of expression in a capitalist setting--or the powerlessness of art in a capitalist setting--a festival that takes place in another part of the world where information and expression are overtly, if more usually subtly, controlled, may well appear to represent something of the public face of that country's political and cultural expression and aspirations. The more overt means may take the form of direct censorship of artworks, displays of police presence, or the presentation of propaganda videos, while less apparent types of information control may include restricting internet access during the festival. This brings us to the tenth edition of the Lianzhou Foto Festival, previously known as the Lianzhou International Photography Festival (LIPF), which takes place each November in a small city in the northwest of Guangdong Province in the southeast of the People's Republic of China, some four hours up the new road from Guangzhou, the heart of the Chinese economic miracle, known in former times as Canton. I have had the pleasure of participating for four of the past ten years of the LIPF as a reviewer, jury member, and invited guest. Aside from being witness to the phenomenal transformation of China over the past ten years, the LIPF has offered an unprecedented opportunity to meet many photographers from China--some famous like Wang Qingsong, and some all but unknown, such as Peng Yangjun, Liu Zheng, and Jiang Zhi. The LIPF, through its relationships with other festivals and through the connections of festival Artistic Director Duan Yuting and President of the Academic Advisory Committee Bao Kun, has been instrumental in promoting contemporary Chinese photography throughout the world. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] That said, there have been instances when images have been removed during the festival, invited critics' internet connections have been cut off, juries for festival prizewinners have found their votes overturned, and mysterious breakdowns of digital slide projections have occurred during public presentations of socially sensitive subjects touching on censorship or politics. …

The City Vanishes: Urban Landscape in Staged Chinese Photography

Recent practice of staged photography in China renders views of urban landscapes as active elements in performative actions directed for the camera. These cityscapes, featured in photographs produced by artists such as Li Wei, Cao Fei, Chi Peng and Xing Danwen, not only reflect the country's rapid urbanisation but also ongoing processes of globalisation. The same processes reconfigure time–space relations around the globe and offer an opportunity to ‘decentre’ the world, but they equally escape capture and document in real time. Fictional photographic elaborations of their accompanying elements, such as the technologisation of culture and the inability to fix a stable image of the future, provide a point of departure to explore photography's role in response to the challenges posed by global urban living. This issue also creates a space for rethinking the critical potential of the medium.

Calendar Photos

Book Review| November 01 2012 Calendar Photos Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography Katonah Museum of ArtKatonah, New York March 25–September 2, 2012 Kathryn Kramer Kathryn Kramer KATHRYN KRAMER is an associate professor in art and art history at State University of New York at Cortland who specializes in modern and contemporary art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2012) 40 (3): 27–29. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2012.40.3.27 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathryn Kramer; Calendar Photos. Afterimage 1 November 2012; 40 (3): 27–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2012.40.3.27 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

No Heaven Awaits Us: Contemporary Chinese Photography at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Chinese art historian Alan Atkinson undertakes an exploration of the hauntingly beautiful images and phenomenal landscapes that populate the dynamic new world of contemporary Chinese photography. Through much of the twentieth century, photography was often thought to provide a neutral lens through which the real world could be documented, yet here Atkinson reveals how twenty-first-century Chinese artists have broken free from this connotation to reveal a stunningly wide range of new cultural meanings and possibilities for photography in the new millennium.

Photography in Sierra Leone, 1850–1918

Opening ParagraphIn recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.

Chinese Photography

Other| January 01 1982 Chinese Photography: Notes Toward a Cross-Cultural Analysis of a Western Medium Sandra Matthews Sandra Matthews Sandra Matthews, who teaches at Otis Parsons in Los Angeles, is the co-editor of Obscura. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1982) 9 (6): 4–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1982.9.6.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sandra Matthews; Chinese Photography: Notes Toward a Cross-Cultural Analysis of a Western Medium. Afterimage 1 January 1982; 9 (6): 4–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1982.9.6.4 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1982 by The Regents of the University of California1982 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.