Early Photography in China

 

Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China

  Jeffrey W. Cody

 

Brought to Asia by Europeans in the early 1840s, photography was both a witness to the dramatic cultural changes taking place in China and a catalyst to further modernization. Employing both ink brush and camera, Chinese painters adapted the new medium, grafting it onto traditional aesthetic conventions.

This exhibition features works by largely unknown Chinese photographers, hand-painted photographs, expansive panoramas, and rare gouache and oil paintings made for export. Images range from a 1859 portrait of a Chinese family made near Shanghai to glass slides of revolutionary soldiers created in 1911 in Shanxi province.

 
Contemporary Chinese photography has received increasing attention both within China and beyond; however, the origin of photography in China is not fully understood. Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China takes its name from the way that the medium of photography was learned and readily adapted by Chinese export painters, who grafted this new technology onto traditional conventions. Representing the work of both Chinese and Western artists, the photographs in this exhibition range from a portrait of a Chinese family taken in Shanghai in 1859 to unique glass slides of revolutionary soldiers in Shanxi province in 1911.

Before the invention of photography in 1839, images of China for export were painted in oil and gouache as well as on popular blue-and-white porcelain. Illustrating a limited repertoire of subjects—tea gardens, pagodas, and fanciful rural scenes—a stereotype of China emerged that was often repeated by photographers, who found a ready market among Western buyers. In this regard, photographers were following a tradition in the West—which blossomed in a European craze for chinoiserie during the 17th and 18th centuries—of reproducing stereotypical images about China on porcelain, wallpaper, furniture, and tapestries; however, photography in China also broke from that tradition of reproduction by capturing images that surprised viewers.

 
Photography was introduced to China in the 1840s through the West’s engagement in the Opium Wars and the subsequent reforms of Chinese statesmen. As a result, traditional modes of expression were dramatically transformed. Uncovered here is a captivating visual history of China during photography’s first century, from the late Qing period to Republican Shanghai and wartime Chongqing. Chinese export painters learned and adapted the medium of photography by grafting the new technology onto traditional artistic conventions—employing both brush and shutter. Ultimately, both Chinese and Western photographers were witnesses to and agents of dynamic cultural change.

The essays in this volume shed new light on the birth of a medium. Jeffrey Cody and Frances Terpak, together with Edwin Lai, discuss the medium’s evolution, commercialization, and dissemination; Wu Hung examines the invention of a portrait style through the lens of Milton Miller; Sarah Fraser investigates how this style shaped China’s national image; and Wen-hsin Yeh addresses the camera’s role in Republican Shanghai and wartime Chongqing. The catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 8 to May 1, 2011.

 Jeffrey W. Cody is a senior project specialist in the Education Department at the Getty Conservation Institute. He is the author of Building in China (The Chinese University Press, 2001) and Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (Routledge, 2003) and coeditor of Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (University of Hawaii Press, 2011). Frances Terpak is curator of photographs at the Getty Research Institute and coauthor of the award-winning Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Getty Publications, 2001).

from: the Getty Center