Photography and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Theorizing New Photographies in Contemporary China: An Introduction","authors":"Hongfeng Tang","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2175482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2175482","url":null,"abstract":"In July 2021, MaoWeidong, a Chinese researcher and translator of photographic theory and history, died at 53 at his home due to illness. During his lifetime, he spent 20 years working for a Chinese state enterprise where he led a stable life. Later, out of his love for photography, he gave up his job in the system of the state and joined Three Shadows Photography Art Center, a major institution dedicated to art photography in China, and China National Photographic Art Publishing House, a leading publisher of photographic theories and photo books of the country. During his tenure at the latter, he and a group of young scholars who used to study photography abroad introduced, compiled, and translated the “Image Series” (Yingxiang wencong影像文丛), a series of 12 books that had appeared by the time of his sudden death. This series, which included critical works by Western researchers at the forefront of photographic theory and history, such as Geoffrey Batchen, Vil em Flusser, and Lucy Soutter, significantly advanced the understanding of international photographic research among local Chinese researchers and practitioners. Prior to this, most of their theoretical understanding of photography was derived from the classic photographic treatises of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, among others. Therefore, as Wu Yiqiang, a university teacher and art critic, puts it, Mao Weidong can be described as “the ferryman of Chinese photography theory” (Wu 2021). The sudden death of this “ferryman” triggered mourning in the Chinese art and photography circles but also revealed the difficult situation and the many problems that exist in photographic research in China. At the beginning of Wu Yiqiang’s essay, the author pointed out that “He (MaoWeidong) died in poverty, which brings shame to those of us who claim to love photography and the studies of photography. The photographic art scene is full of too many money-spinning exhibitions and projects, full of vanity and frivolity. Yet, we cannot even guarantee someone devoted to academic translation a slightly decent life.” (Wu 2021) As a scholar of art theory and visual culture at the university, I deeply resonate with Wu’s lament. On the one hand, China’s photography industry is thriving: Year after year, more and more Chinese students are studying photography in European and American universities;","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48193997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Finding You Is My Courage: New Stories of Homecoming in Chinese Photography Since the 2000s","authors":"Hao Hu","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2156170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2156170","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.”","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41772915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Searching for the Homeland with Stories and Sands: ‘My Tarim’ and ‘Sand, Sand, and Sand’","authors":"Boyuan Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2099329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2099329","url":null,"abstract":"Over a hundred years ago, explorers, adventurers, and archaeologists from the West and East alike arrived to Southern Xinjiang, a region that was known in dynastic China as the Western Region (xiyu). They came here for different purposes—discovery expeditions, archaeological excavation, smuggling cultural relics, and many more. Whatever had been covered by the dunes of Taklimakan, they wanted to unveil it. In 1993, I was born to a Han migration family in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China. Even though I was raised in Urumqi (the capital of Xinjiang) and told the stories and legends of adventures in the desert, my recognition of the region has been excluded from the multi-ethnic and vast land of Southern Xinjiang. To uncover those customs and culture, relate them to my growing-up memories that make me who I am, I have been photographing the Tarim Basin in Southern Xinjiang since 2017. These photographs, most of which were taken during road trips along the still-thriving Tarim River traversing the desert land, are compiled into a project called “My Tarim”. In my second journey to Taklimakan, I looked at the tedious but pressing desert, starting to wonder whether I had managed to capture what the sand truly looks like. I had a dozen collections of sand samples. They were in different materials, sizes, and came from separate locations of the desert. Despite their distinctions, however, they are generally identified as mere “yellow sand”. Once I realized this and tried to pick up and observe the sand, I further found it impossible to isolate one piece of sand from the others. From this point, I decided to make “portraits” for the sand. After failing countless times with macro-lens and microscopes, I consulted an optic scientist, who was interested in my project and introduced me to the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). In March 2021, after pilot","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43814173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tethered Lamb in the Flow: The Tension Between Historical Contemplation and Present Aliveness in the Odes of Taca Sui","authors":"Yueqi Luo","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2099339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2099339","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Inspired by the ancient Chinese canonical poetry anthology The Book of Odes (Shijing), the photographer Taca Sui created the Odes (Shishan hekao) series through textual research and field investigation. While the poems in The Book of Odes depict the natural landscape and social environment of the Zhou Dynasty and the thoughts and feelings of ancient people, the Odes seeks Chinese cultural roots and, in retrospect, reveals the tension between historical contemplation and present aliveness. By highlighting one plate entitled “Chou Feng Series, Lamb” from the Odes project, this essay aims to shed light on several points regarding the photographer’s working mode, as well as the underlying paradoxical ways of seeing. He attempts to stagnate the historicity in The Book of Odes with photography. However, history itself is in constant movement and this dimension of motion cannot be eliminated. The photographer tries to approach the present at close quarters, but the historical gaze has already saturated the artist’s work. These tensions in Taca’s photography imply that photographic images, as one of the most contemporary forms of media, hold the possibility of resisting time.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42193239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"For Those Who Played: Representing Indigenous Music in The Complete Works of Zhuang Xueben","authors":"Yang Qiao","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2150128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2150128","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay investigates a certain type of archival photographs – photographic records of music and performing scenes – included in The Complete Works of Zhuang Xueben, published by Zhonghua Book Company in 2009. Born in 1909 and died in 1984, Zhuang has widely been recognized as a pioneering figure of documentary photography and visual anthropology in China, whose photographic and written records of indigenous groups in Xikang (now parts of Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan Province) have won him significant reputation throughout the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China eras. The Complete Works contains more than 3,200 photographs he took during his several ethnological fieldworks between 1934 to the 1950s, involving indigenous people belonging to Tibetan, Qiang, Hui and Tu ethnicities. The purpose of sorting out and re-organizing the music-themed photographs in The Complete Works is to respond to recent debates among Chinese academics over Zhuang Xueben’s photography. It uses music iconography as its method of analysis, guiding the reader to grasp the “rhythms” embedded in these “musical images”.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47073022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Amateurism: An Alternative Narrative of Photography in China, Part I","authors":"Yunchang Yang","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2121480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2121480","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As the first part of a long history-ethnography dedicated to amateur photography in China – an understudied, yet impactful, visual culture within the country’s modern history and contemporary society – this article provides a historical account of the shifts in the definition of ‘amateurism’ in Chinese social, cultural, and ideological scenes from the 1840 s to the present. It argues that the idea(l) of amateurism is rooted in traditional Chinese cultural elites and representative of an avant-garde spirit, which was invested in photographic practices before the technology was popularized in China in the 1980s. The article also identifies how a new kind of photographic amateurism began to develop with the rise of the urban middle class in the 1980s. Today, photography embodies the thriving mass culture and has become ubiquitous in ordinary people’s everyday lives as a medium that empowers the invisible to emerge and the muted to speak.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48246589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Extension of Meanings: Text and Image in Contemporary Chinese Photographic Works","authors":"Yining He","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2142015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2142015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49295321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Multiethnic Pioneers”: Representation of Korean Agrarian Villages in Manshū gurafu and the Vision of a Multiethnic State","authors":"In-Seon Kang","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2069649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2069649","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Manchuria (also known as Manchukuo) was a puppet state established by Japanese empire after the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931. From its genesis, Manchuria sought to create a positive image of itself both for domestic Japanese and international audiences. This paper focuses on Manshū gurafu (Manchuria Graph), a magazine published by the South Manchuria Rail Company. The magazine is important as a specialist photographic publication and has recently received much attention, particularly thanks to the fact that it was edited by well-known Japanese photographer Fuchikami Hakuyō. This article focuses on images of the colonized, specifically examining visual representations of Koreans residing in Manchuria and other travel-related photography. In this way, the article demonstrates how photographic images of Koreans in Manchuria happen to reveal conflicts within Manchurian state ideology, including the concept of Harmony among Five Races. Also addressed are the ways in which the visual mechanism of photomontage visualized both the symbolic meaning and inherent conflicts of the notion of multiethnicity in Manchuria.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48936976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Days of Isolation: Queering a Pandemic - Playing Myself/Selves","authors":"Richard Smith","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2059920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2059920","url":null,"abstract":"During the UK lockdowns and days of isolation I retreated to my temporary home studio in Norfolk, to continue a project originally started in 2019, initially titled The Unknowing...X (playing myself/selves). A project that builds upon an established internationally recognized practice as a photographic artist where the work could only be described as autobiographical. This practice has resulted in a sustained and focused body of work since 1994 when I was diagnosed HIV positive. Since that point, I have used myself almost entirely as the sole figure in the images, a way of articulating my experience as a person living with HIV. Developing a personal narrative for nearly three decades now, one that resists a definition of the medicalization of the body. We might think here of work by Mark Morrisroe or DavidWojnarowicz, although I have been very fortunate to have lived so long. Initially told I had a life expectancy of approximately ten years or less, twenty-eight years later and with a normal life expectancy, I find myself reviewing and rewriting the self to articulate potential future(s). Playing myself/selves is my most autobiographical project to to date, and marks a significant shift in the methodology for producing work and was originally an attempt to move away from the narrative of HIV. A playful and joyous process, although with outcomes that could be said to have a brooding, underlying dark humor about them. This new process of working I call ‘unknowing’ has led to a subconscious act of image making, drawing on previous lives lived, memories, and the influences that have shaped my practice and my world, telling the story of my life through a series of self-portraits. A form of playing the different selves and personas inhabited through my life. This process required delving into a massive adult dressing up box, creating multiple new individual personas to imagine what the future might hold. On reflection, rather than moving away from HIV I can clearly see the project builds on and responds to the success of the medication that, as I fast approach sixty, I’m able to be thinking about retirement and a life beyond. In the images I’m playing at being myself or more accurately a mash up of previous roles. The process in making the new work was a shift away from planned and researched outcomes of previous projects to literally in habiting a space of ‘not knowing’. Not just not","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44610018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Documents from the Edges of Conflict","authors":"Ollie Gapper","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2064128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2064128","url":null,"abstract":"With almost terrible prescience, Documents from the Edges of Conflict, a show curated by Jean Wainwright and Steffi Klenz, will close its doors to a world very different to the one it opened to just three months earlier. While it is tempting to phrase this in terms of before and after the invasion of Ukraine, to do so would be, as demonstrated by many works within the show, far too simplistic. What much of the works on display in Documents from the Edges of Conflict do in fact is highlight that we are not on the edges of the start or end of conflict in a temporal sense, but that we are on the edges in terms of conscious perception; war, since at least the Bush administration, has been a continuous process of ‘indirect’ engagement, neatly contained to an arena just outside the peripheries of our daily lives. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the rupturing of this boundary, bringing into horrifying visible reality the grim spectacle of war once again. What Wainwright and Klenz have done here in the James Hockey Gallery is curate a show that challenges the artifice of peace we surround ourselves with – for, to acknowledge the absurd and continuous presence of war all around us would be to destabilise the structure upon which we rationalise our day-to-day lives. Entering the space, one is first struck by the myriad of complex sightlines matched only by the tableaux of the show as a whole; from Santiago Sierra’s huge images peeping from behind the wall on which Catherine Yass’s glowing light box sits, to the concrete structure delivered by Klenz’s austere black and white works and the spatially luxurious David Birkin pieces, the show is a slick curation and it’s not afraid to show it. That’s not to shun it to the realms of an aesthetic-forward arrangement however, its aesthetic sensibilities acting as support for the conceptual intelligence of both its arrangement and design. Questions of photographic veracity and authenticity flood the opening space, which echoes with the sound of EDL and British nationalist protest mobs, courtesy of MacDonaldStrand’s three screen installation No More Flags, 2021 – a three piece video work which crudely removes flags from images of far-right protests in a bid to remove the rhetoric of patriotism and nationalism from the justification of mob violence, conditioning the space with the aggressive toxicity of its score from the moment one enters. The resonance between this ringing chorus of aggression and xenophobic hatred and Steffi Klenz’s Beun, is impossible","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47503231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}