Photography in China
Photography arrived in China in the 1860s with Western photographers, most of whom took portraits.
One of the best known of these photographers was Milton Miller, an American who owned a photography studio in Hong Kong. He took formal portraits of Cantonese merchants, Mandarins and their families in the early 1860s. The other is the Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921), who owned a photographic studio in Hong Kong. Unlike Miller’s subjects, Thomson’s were peasants and workers – the underclass of the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Studios run by Western photographers provided practical training for Chinese photographers and produced some important photographers. Afong Lai and Mee Cheung were active during this period, and both managed to turn their interest to commercial advantage. Afong was active from the 1860s to the 1880s, and in 1937 he published a photo album in Shanghai entitled The Sino-Japanese Hostilities, which presented 110 black-and-white photographs that were seen primarily as historical documents. Some of his landscapes, however, express aesthetic qualities reminiscent of traditional Chinese painting.
Mee Cheung identified himself as a ”High Class Photographer,” a clear reference to fine art aspirations, and is known for his documentary, snapshot-style photographs.
As the nineteenth century progressed and the West became increasingly fascinated with the country, its culture, and its art forms, China attracted numerous Western amateur and professional photographers. Most were interested in capturing images of historical significance. The Italian Felice Beato, also known for his later work in Japan, photographed landscapes and battle scenes in the 1860s. The Englishman Thomas Childe completed a series of photographs of Beijing and its environs in the early 1870s. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, Western photographers were discouraged and then banned from taking pictures in China. Some of the few that exist were taken by a young boy, Walter J. Bronson, who secretly photographed as he traveled around China with his family. M.E. Alonso was a photographer on the 1923 Wulsin Expedition to Northwest China, sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society, which brought some of the first photographs of these areas to the West. Donald Mennie, a British merchant, photographed landscapes in a pictorialist style in the 1920s.
In 1926, he published a photo album in Shanghai entitled The Grandeur of the Gorges, in which he presented his 50 photographic studies of the Yangtze River, along with 12 hand-colored prints.
He had previously published The Pageant of Peking and Chin-North and South.

In 1925, China was swept by the May 30 Movement, an anti-imperialist movement protesting the massacre of Chinese people by British police in Shanghai on that day. This movement had a great impact on how Western influence was received, but also formally introduced modern photography, especially photojournalism, to China, and later shaped the development of photography in the 1930s, when Mao Zedong and the Communist Revolution shaped China’s history.
CHEN Wanli is the most influential photographer of this period. He began studying photography in 1919, with a background in medicine. He was concerned with photographic composition and the photographer’s artistic interpretation of the subject. His work The Forbidden City, in 1924, is considered the first documentary photography in China. In this series of photographs, he documented the scenes of the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty being banished from the Forbidden City. In 1928, he selected several photographs from this series and published them as a photo album through a Shanghai bookstore.
His Dafengji (1924) is the first photo album produced by an individual photographer in China and contains 12 photographs selected from his solo exhibition at Guan Shen in 1924. These photographs depict landscape and still life according to the traditional Chinese aesthetic. The photographs express the abstract and painterly quality of the subjects rather than any realistic association. For him, the art of photography is to express the color of Chinese art and develop its characteristics. Dafengji was created to reflect this understanding of photography.
The Journal to the West, 1925, is an album of photographs taken during his visit to Tun Wong with American anthropologists. He took more than 300 photographs of the desert and rural costumes.
Chen was also a leading member of the Photographers’ Association in China. In 1923, together with WU Yuzhuo and WU Jix, he organized the first photographic association for amateurs. This group was commonly known as the Guang (literally meaning light) Association.
From 1924 to 1927, the association actively held group exhibitions to display the works of its members.
In 1928 and 1929, these works were published in two volumes of yearbooks, the first of their kind in China.
LIU Bannong (1891-1934) was known as a poet and a scholar of language, literature and education, as well as a supporter of the May 30 Movement. In photography, he was the leading exponent of the theory of photography in China.
He had studied in Britain and France and earned a doctorate in literature. He had learned photography while studying in Paris in the early 1920s, and in 1926 he joined the Guang Association and became very active in the field of photography. He was the editor of two photographic yearbooks. He also translated photographic essays into Chinese. In 1927, he published Talking about Photography, which summarized his views on photography. The book was distributed to the public and became very influential. One of his arguments in the book tries to show that photography is a kind of art, and then emphasizes the principles of aesthetics in photography, such as composition, lighting, and tonality.
He promoted photography as a means of expression and creation, and his ideas remain influential today.
LONG Chin-san (also Jinshan; 1892-1995) was born in Zhejiang Province, in China, and died in Taipei. Between 1903 and 1906 he studied Chinese ink painting and later photography at a high school in Shanghai. He worked for newspaper publishers in China and is considered the first photojournalist in the country. In 1911, he took a job in the advertising department of a newspaper publisher in Shanghai, where he could observe photography at first hand. From 1926 to 1937, he worked as a photographer for the Shanghai Times.
In 1928, together with HU Boxiang (1896-1989), HUANG Baohui, HUANG Zhengyu and ZHANG Zhenhuo, Long Chin-san founded the China Photography Society in Shanghai, one of the earliest photographic associations in southern China and the most influential nationwide photographic organization in China. Long was a leading photographer in Shanghai at that time. In March 1926, he had a solo exhibition, which inspired other photographers to hold photo exhibitions. In 1930, he lectured on photography at Nanyang High School, a girls’ school in Shanghai, which may have encouraged the spread of formal photography education throughout China. After World War II, Long moved to Taiwan, and in 1961, he created montage pictorial photography.
Photography during the rise of the Chinese Communist Party is associated with war reportage and portraits of Communist leaders. In 1937, SA Fe joined the Communist Eighth Route Army, and two years later he established a propaganda department to develop reportage photography for the Party. This department initiated photojournalism in the Party. In 1938, SU Jing held the first workshop on photojournalism to train Party photographers. An alternative way of training in photography was to apply the ancient master-disciple system to young photographers.
Photographic training had two goals: to train photographers to use the medium to promote the significance of the revolution, and to teach photographers basic darkroom skills.
It was also during this period that a number of pictorial newspapers appeared to inform the public about the war. The Communist Party saw these newspapers as a propaganda tool, and, in 1942, it established its own illustrated newspaper to showcase photojournalism that extolled the successes of the Eighth Route Army. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, illustrated newspapers and magazines continued to play a role in promoting the Party and its ideals. Two important pictorial magazines, China Pictorial and China Reconstructs, were published, providing an outlet for social documentary and reportage photography.
WU Yinxian (1900-1994) was the most active and well known photographer who sympathized with Communist causes. He was popular for his socialist and realistic style in documenting the history of China’s communists. He was concerned with the form and technique of lighting to dramatize his visual subjects. His early work focused primarily on the miserable lives of marginal and lower-class subjects confronted with the social and political changes of the 1920s and 1930s. Later, he developed photographic training programs for the Red Army. He had joined the party in 1938, and in 1939 he published The Knowledge of Photography, a textbook for communist photographers. One of his best-known works, Dr. Bai Qiuen (1939), documents an outdoor operation on a Communist soldier. The photograph expresses Dr. Bai’s dignity as he attempts to save the soldier, seemingly unconcerned with the danger of the ongoing war. Dr. Bai was a foreigner, but his bravery symbolized his strong commitment to the revolution. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, Wu Yinxian focused on the development of film education in China.
XU Xiaobing (b. 1916) and HOU Bo (b. 1924) are a couple known for their portraits of Communist leaders and important ceremonies in the history of the Party from the 1930s to the 1950s.
They are especially famous for their portraits of Chairman Mao, as Hou Bo was Mao’s personal photographer from about 1949 to 1961.
Although he is primarily a filmmaker, one of Xu Xiaobing’s portraits of Mao is a profile view of Mao facing an adoring audience. This photograph later became a model for photographers to show their leader’s openness to the public. Xu studied photography at a film company in Shanghai.
He later joined the Party and served as a photojournalist, documenting the early history of the Party on film. After 1949, he was active in documenting important national ceremonies and events. Hou’s photograph of the ceremonial founding of the PRC in Tiananmen Square captures the most significant single moment in the history of the PRC, and her studio portraits of Mao became the basis for the famous paintings, posters, and banners of Mao that were ubiquitous during this period.
It is not an exaggeration to say that there was no ”personal” photography in China at that time. Cameras were rare commodities and used only for official purposes: identification, documentation of state projects and leaders, and propaganda as China rebuilt its war-torn nation and entered the modern era.
However, it is important to note the significance of SUN Mingjing’s work during this period.
Sun was an amateur photographer, and his photography was not well known until recently.
Sun was instrumental in the establishment and development of film education in China. He had learned film and photography from American missionaries.
As a scientist and engineer in the service of the Party, he made numerous field trips to China to study the state of industrial production. During these trips, he took over a thousand photographs and made documentary films. Some of these photographs are important for documenting the social conditions of the time and for preserving historical moments of the era. However, some of the photos also express Sun’s concern with the symbolism and aesthetics of photography that were denied by social documentary and reportage photography. One photograph depicts a scene in which a city is ravaged by a plague of locusts; Sun uses the locusts to symbolize the invading Japanese army, as the word ”locust” in Chinese is euphonically similar to the translation of ”Japanese army’’.
Another photograph shows rows of young naked teachers, silhouetted against the sunrise, performing physical excisions. The symbolism of wartime patriotic struggle is evident from the fact that the Chinese translations of the phrases ”against the sunrise” and ”against Japan” are exactly the same, and from the fact that the projected shadows of these men form a pattern suggestive of the Japanese war flag. Sun Mingjing, unique in Chinese social documentary and reportage photography, approached photography with the idea of transfiguring accepted motifs into symbolic images.
Since there was virtually no artistic expression in photography in the People’s Republic, the Cultural Revolution, which took place between 1966 and 1976, had little impact on the field.
Although intellectuals, artists, and other cultural elites were persecuted, banned from practicing their disciplines, interned, and even killed, and the study and practice of art, music, and literature were greatly affected, the impact on photography was indirect, with the result that when reforms were introduced in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, photography was for the first time taken seriously as an artistic medium, following the models of the West.
For the first time, photographers could adopt an identity as creative individuals and see their work as an expression of their individual personalities.
Landscape photography, nature studies, expressive portraiture, and even social and veiled political commentary began to be practiced. Documentary photography, however, still dominated.
Several well-known Western photographers produced important bodies of work in China in the second half of the century, most notably Henri Cartier-Bresson. His extensive documentation was published by Robert Delpire, in 1955. Robert Capa, Marc Riboud, and René Burri also produced important series.
In the late 1980s, documentary photography began to take off in China. HAN Lei and LIU Zheng (b. 1969) are two examples of photographers engaged in this type of photography.
They often photographed marginalized people – workers and others from the lower classes – who were facing dramatic changes in their lifestyles and social status as a result of China’s process of Western modernization. These photographers traveled to select their subjects and documented them over long periods of time. Liu Zheng’s series The Chinese is considered a pioneering body of images in that it depicts groups and individuals from all walks of life engaged in actual activities, as opposed to staged, propagandistic representations of the Communist Party’s social programs.
Liu Zheng has continued to produce important bodies of work, including his series of lush color tableaux, Four Beauties, which depict the lives of four fabled historical women.
CHEN Changfen is an important landscape photographer of the period. He began his professional photography career in 1959. He was selected by Time magazine as one of the 10 most important photographers in the history of photography. He is best known for his landscape photographs of the Great Wall of China, a subject that has fascinated him since 1959. His photographs successfully combine the aesthetics of photography and ancient Chinese monuments.
After the mid-1990s, with the country’s increasing affluence and globalization, photography became widespread in China. It also came to dominate contemporary art practice in China, now eagerly sought by Western art lovers.
During this period, however, photography was practiced by artists who were trained in fine art rather than photography, resulting in an open and experimental style. The availability of digital photography was another important factor in the development of contemporary photography.
The domestic market for photography was further stimulated by the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturers of photographic equipment, especially digital cameras, in the 1990s.
QIU Zhijie (b. 1969) is one of the pioneers of contemporary photography. In his early works, he depicted the lives of middle-class people in terms of their livelihoods and lifestyles.
The early work of XING Danwen (b. 1967) deals with the Cultural Revolution from a reportage perspective. In her later work, she became interested in China’s global issues of e-trash and urban transformation.
RONG Rong (b. 1968) lived and studied photography in Japan in the mid-1990s. In his early career, he was interested in documentary photography. Later, he took self-portraits, sometimes with his wife, using ruined buildings and sublime landscapes as settings.
The rapid transformation of China in the social, political, cultural, and economic spheres came to the lens of these artists’ cameras during this period.
YANG Yong was interested in depicting the city in its various facets. He preferred to take snapshots for his subjects.
HONG Hao (b. 1965) is another Chinese artist who looks to the West and is interested in staged photography. In his works, facsimiles of advertising photographs in which he appears as a suave model selling Western luxuries and lifestyles, Hong Hao creates scenes that symbolize the dream world of the middle class in China. A typical work is Hello, Mr. Hong from 1998.
HAI Bo’s (b. 1962) photographs deal with issues of family and his own cultural identity in relation to the socialist meaning of family. He has often used historical photographs as material to create new works. In Them, 1999, he reassembled a number of women in drab Maoist garb who had been photographed in an official black-and-white group portrait from 1973, photographing them in exactly the same configuration, but in color, wearing Western-style dresses.
The use of historical motifs also underlies the work of ZHUANG Hui, who stages large group portraits of schools, factories, and other institutions in the style of official photography from earlier eras.
WANG Qingsong mines the entire span of Chinese history in ambitious, panoramic works that assemble dozens of models in elaborate tableaux, often with the intention of pointing out or satirizing modernization; in Look Up, Look Up, 2000, a group of people in unflattering clothes and the latest hairstyles stand looking up at an oversized bottle of Coca-Cola.
HONG Lei (b. 1960) is known for his photographic appropriation of Chinese landscape paintings. He would find the exact scene depicted by a Chinese painter and take a photograph based on the exact aesthetic and visual effect the painting conveys. ZHAO Bandi (b. 1966) uses digital techniques to create photographs that incorporate his own images, an artificial panda, and texts reminiscent of propaganda posters and advertisements.
Photography in China has only recently been linked to international trends. And it was not until the end of the 20th century that photography became a formal major in art schools. It was also at the end of the century that international photography exhibitions began to be held in China, bringing prominent international artists, curators, and critics to exhibit and lecture. The Courtyard Gallery and the Red Gate Gallery, in Beijing, founded by Westerners, were important private institutions for the promotion of contemporary Chinese photography and art. Local artists using photography and video, which had become extremely popular by the end of the century, had increasing opportunities to show their work abroad, especially in Europe, and to engage with China’s global issues. Groundbreaking traveling exhibitions organized by the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, and the International Center of Photography, New York, toured around the turn of the century.
One of the most important contemporary Chinese photographers with an international focus is WENG Fen, born in 1961. Weng Fen’s series of large-scale color works entitled Wall Straddle, 2001, depicts young girls in school uniforms sitting on crumbling, garbage-strewn walls, gazing into the distance at modern skylines. His interpretation of China’s urban development relies on symbolism – as if the girls in these photographs were predicting the future of a globalized China.
CHEN Lingyang is a pioneering artist whose work explores the female body and female identity in relation to the image of the city. Twelve Moon Flowers, 1999-2000, poetically depicts female genitalia as the viewer sees their relationship to twelve flowers.
XIANG Liqing (b. 1973) montages hundreds of images of skyscrapers to create colorful, large-scale tableaux that comment on the anonymity of modern urban society.
YANG Zhenzhong (b. 1968) satirizes contemporary Chinese family life and politics with his portraits of squawking roosters, hens, and chicks standing in for husbands and wives, fathers, mothers, and children in his series Family Fortunes, Lucky Family from the mid-1990s.
Important Chinese photographers living abroad include ZHANG Huan (b. 1965), who is best known for performances that test the limits of his physical endurance; he also directs performances that he documents with large-scale color photographs, such as the 1997 image of Chinese men half submerged in a body of water entitled To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond.