Guest Editor’s Introduction

Photography’s Places

How does one place a photograph like the one featured on the cover of this special issue, Zhu Shouren’s “Qu jing” (“Picture Taking”)? What does it represent? What does its surface show? With what pictorial, discursive, spatial, and material contexts does the photograph engage, and what conditions does it create? What traces can be gleaned of the material conditions of its production? What kinds of knowledge are (or can be) produced through the materiality of this photograph? Or, rather, what kinds of knowledge did the photographer think he was producing, what kinds of knowledge might the photographer’s audiences have produced through their consumption of it, and what kinds of knowledge can we produce in the present through our engagement with it?

This photograph appeared in the July 1932 issue of one of the most prominent and lavishly produced art photography publications of the day in Shanghai, The Chinese Journal of Photography (Zhonghua sheying zazhi), and, at first glance, it exemplifies the landscape aesthetic promoted in the journal. The photographer employs a relatively shallow depth of field in order to maintain a sharp focus on the main subject (as can be seen in the finely delineated details of the boats in the foreground), while allowing the distance to grow vague (as the far shore and pagoda in the background threaten to dissolve into a blur); such an aesthetic draws on practices of pictorialist photography that were circulating globally at the time, one of whose goals was to reproduce the effect of a momentary visual impression. This practice was perhaps most closely associated with the English photographer Peter Henry Emerson, whose work had been exhibited in East Asia as early as 1893.¹ The specific practice made manifest in this photograph, however — which we see as well in other photographs by Zhu, as well as in the work of Hu Boxiang and Lang Jingshan, among others — is the deployment of pictorialist techniques to reappropriate long-existing Chinese techniques of landscape representation. For with its bands of sky, shore, and water, whose slight diminishing and broadening balance each other across the composition, the photograph seems designed to appear as if it were a section of a handscroll that continues beyond the 4 × 5 photographic frame, the lens blur of the pagoda and far shore evoking an ink wash as well as atmospheric perspective. What distinguishes this photograph, however, are the two dark figures at the lower left, which have been burned in for emphasis during the printing process to contrast sharply with the more lightly exposed landscape and boats. It is not uncommon, of course, for a spectator to be depicted in a landscape picture as a stand-in for the viewer of the picture as a whole. But, in this case, the place of the depicted figure contemplating the landscape is taken by a photographer; for the figure on the left, judging from his stance, is peering down into the waist-level viewfinder typical of a Rolleiflex or of a portable 4 × 5 large-format camera, such as the U.S.-made Graflex, both of which were used at this the time in China by both foreigners and Chinese.

So how do we place such a photograph? As a redeployment of the Emersonian pictorialist practices of photography once prevalent across East Asia? Or as an evocation of other mediums, such as landscape ink painting? Or, since the pictorialist practices it uses to evoke ink-painting now appear dated, do we locate this photograph in the past, as a document of a moment in history with its specific modes of transportation, dress, camera equipment, and, of course, photographic aesthetics? Or, as it is primarily a landscape photograph, should we understand it as an evocation of a place at a particular moment in the past?

The title, “Picture-Taking,” complicates these questions, for it does not refer to the landscape or view as such, as would, say, a title like “Fengjing” (“landscape” or “scene”), or a reference to a specific place. Instead, Zhu’s title calls attention to the act of picture-taking. The...