Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts.
Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry
were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the
Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative
technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and
representing the world?
Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed
by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations
between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican
eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the
new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into
illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs,
Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including
self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed
photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and
photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues
that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic
creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an
increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An
interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and
media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture
in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary
and visual modernities.
