When Kodak Came to China

This book examines how amateur photography emerged and developed in China from 1900 to 1937, and how the photographic societies, exhibitions and publications opened new avenues of photographic expression after six decades of problematic colonial photography. Through extensive analysis of photographs and publications by the amateur photographers in the Republican period, the author argues that photography, once a luxury hobby of the elites in the late nineteenth century was transformed into a new communicative and expressive medium for Chinese intellectuals and urban professionals. This rise of amateur photography in China and the new photographic vocabulary developed by the photographic societies, exhibitions, and publications from the 1900s to the 1930s indeed contributed to the particular aspects and eventual growth of photographic modernity, which is a distinct mode of modern experience mediated through the camera that enabled Chinese subjects to shift from passive objects of the colonial gaze to active image-makers who could capture fleeting moments, experiment with modern identities, and forge new communities that crossed traditional boundaries between art, science, and commerce.