Shadow modernism : photography, writing, and space in Shanghai, 1925-1937 / William Schaefer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schaefer, William, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography--China--Shanghai--History--20th century.

Photography.

Modernism (Art)--China--Shanghai.

Modernism (Art).

Shanghai (China)--Civilization--20th century.

Shanghai (China).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2017.

System Details:

text file

PDF

Summary:

During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture. 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. 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. 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.0Analyzing 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 past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era, and yet hidden in plain sight.

Contents:

Modernism and photography's places

Picturing photography, abstracting pictures

False portals

Landscapes of images

Projected pasts

Montage landscapes

Shanghai savage.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822372523

0822372525

OCLC:

974992362