Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.54 (685 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822369192 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
“In this extraordinary book, William Schaefer shows how major thinkers in China, England, France, Germany, and Japan all grappled with similar problems while borrowing from, or competing with, one another. What emerges is a more dynamic and a more realistic sense of a modern cultural discourse coproduced by photographers, artists, writers, and intellectuals operating within a competitive global environment yet intent on solving many of the same, shared, human problems.”
In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images. Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as "transplanted from Europe" and “paved with shadows,” for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past’s traces. During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture. The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways. Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the