The question of “what is photography” is ineluctably tied to another question: “where is photography?" Similarly, for the history of photography in China, questions of photography’s points of origin, routes of circulation, as well as the direction of representational gazes have loomed large. Oliver Moore’s recent book Photography in China: Science, Commerce and Communication is no exception to these concerns, but it intends to provide a different approach: to “[explain] photography’s history from a Chinese viewpoint” (3). While this might seem to imply a nationalistic or cultural identity, what Moore refers to as “Chinese” is rather “several degrees of space” (12) where photography was simultaneously local, global, and “suspended at the intermediate level of the East Asian region” (6). Through this transnational and transregional view, Moore seeks to account for a “Chinese agency” (8) that remains obscured in existing historiographical accounts, either due to the equation of photography with the imported, the Western, the foreign, and the imperial in most global histories of photography, or due to the association of photography with exclusively modern visual culture in urban centers like Shanghai, resulting in what he refers to as a “metropolitan chauvinism” (48). Expanding his objects of analysis from the end product of photography, namely photographic images, to scientific treatises, technical manuals, as well as commercial advertisements, Moore presents a history of tinkering with the concepts and techniques of photography in China from 1839 to 1937. 

Moore’s agenda of reclaiming a “Chinese agency” is best exemplified by the two chapters constituting the book’s first section titled “Science.” A central argument is that early interests in photography went far beyond its reprographic potential (21). Although this might be true for photography in general before it became the hallmark of mechanical reproducibility, as in Kaja Silverman’s The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography (Stanford University Press, 2015), Moore’s account highlights what is gained, rather than lost, in translation. Chapter one thus introduces several figures largely neglected in anglophone scholarship: a unique generation of polymaths versed in both Western science and literati education in late imperial China, including Fang Yizhi (1611–1671), Zheng Fuguang (1780–1853), and Zou Boqi (1819–1869), missionaries such as John Dudgeon (1837–1901), John Fryer (1839–1928) and his collaborator, the translator Xu Shou (1818–1884), and the diplomat Guo Songtao (1818–1891). Besides translating or composing technical treatises, importing photo supplies, and demonstrating photography as an optical wonder, these forgotten figures also exercised their agency in “muster[ing] items from the lexicons of deeply established visual practices” (13) to determine the Chinese term for photography. Chapter two thus retrieves past conceptions of photography from three terms: “‘capturing images’ (sheying), loaned from the science of optics, ‘transcribing authenticity’ (xiezhen), the most graphic of the three with its origins in drawing and painting, and ‘reflecting appearances’ (zhaoxiang), which fused ideas to do with light, appearance and prognostication” (55). Although not directly specified, this chapter is in conversation with Yi Gu’s article, “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840–1911,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 120–38. Where Gu takes a diachronic approach to delineate the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth as sheying became photography’s dominant designation, Moore conveys the volatility of these designations as transplants across mediums (most notably, painting and ink rubbing) and languages, especially between Chinese and Japanese. For Moore, such semantic instability is a source and emblem of photography’s “varying priorities” (20) before it was reduced to an imported, reprographic medium “during China’s transition from empire to republic” (45).

These negotiations over the question of photography’s ontological status did not remain an elite concern nor discursive rumination. Another aspect of the “Chinese agency” that Moore seeks to reclaim is the public’s encounter with photography through photo studios. Part two of the book, titled “Commerce,” thus offers a history of photo studios, which for Moore were not only “sites of production and agencies of visual articulation,” but also “units of cultural organization, consultancies for healthy living, and objects of social imagination” (87). Moore’s extensive archival research maps out the presence of studios in and outside of major cities like Shanghai, highlighting especially Guangdong photographers’ role in spreading photo business and knowledge (96–100). One does wonder, however, if a clearer historical argument could be made about shifting centers of production and aesthetic trends, and whether such shifts paralleled changing understandings of photography. In addition to its geographical comprehensiveness, Moore’s discussion also draws our attention to the “paratext” of individual photographs: the photo studio’s carefully selected names and locations, novel architecture and backdrops, as well as its advertising strategies and nonphotographic businesses, including watch repair, hairdressing, and selling carbonated drinks. Many of these either appeared in a photograph as its background, as a decorative pattern stamped onto the matting board or did not appear in the photograph at all. Moore’s narrative suggests that they were equally important in constituting photo studios and, by extension, photography as a site of performativity.

Part three of the book, titled “Communication,” turns to the reception and circulation of photographs. Chapter five revisits the public’s varying reactions toward popular photographic genres, including photographs of queue-cutting, theatrical and costumed performances, divided selves (huashen or fenshen), infrastructural developments, and famous landscapes. Chapter six surveys photography’s “patterns of communication” (216) as personal gifts, exhibited objects, and design elements in pictorial magazines. Many of these genres have been discussed by scholars like Wu Hung, Catherine Yeh, and Juliane Noth. Moore, however, by subsuming them under the title “communication,” raises a methodological question: “What, then, helps to make content critically interesting?” (151). In what way does the photograph’s subject matter still provide certain affordance for technological enchantment and our understanding of it, instead of the other way around?

This part of the book would benefit from further discussion about Moore’s insistence upon communication as an analytical tool, and its distinction from “circulation” or “distribution” of photography. One answer, latent in recent literature on the history of photography in China, is the conceptual shift in thinking about photography not simply as a representational medium, nor just a channel of transmitting messages, but as a media technology that provides the condition of possibility for modern subjects. This conceptual shift, as well as Moore’s choice of photographic genres, aligns Moore’s book with two roughly contemporaneous monographs, Shengqing Wu’s Photo Poetics (Columbia University Press, 2020) and Shaolin Ma’s The Stone and the Wireless (Duke University Press, 2021). Both books situate photography in an emerging media ecology in turn-of-the-century China, probing into its interaction with literati modes of poetic inscription and the new culture of mass mediation. Together these three books expand the previous scholarly focus on photographs to examine the material and symbolic affordance of the photographic medium, which allows them to answer the ontological question, “What exactly was photography in China?” Similar to how Wu and Ma theorize from the fraught divide between technology and culture embodied by media technologies like photography, Moore evokes the Bourdieusian dialectic between familiarity and esteem, between ambivalent attitude towards one’s cultural backdrop and the optical device’s scientific and technological allure. One potential argument Moore hints at is that the formation of photographic meaning, as well as the meaning of “photography” as a novel technology and cultural technique, takes place throughout its circuit of communication both locally and globally, and not prior to its circulation.

Moore’s book surveys the history of photography in China not by the images created, but by the diverse kinds of activities in which photography participated. This book provides invaluable information for researchers seeking to break new ground in subfields of photo history, including the history of photo studios and exhibitions. It is also indispensable for exploring the expanded field of photography in China, as Moore’s curation of photo history highlights that beyond commemorative and entertainment functions, photography was part and parcel of the pursuit of commercial value, technical knowledge, and scientific truth. Accordingly, Moore’s citation of scholarship, ranging from Bruno Latour to Wang Hui and Benjamin Elman, gestures at an interdisciplinary approach to photo history, where photography was both a tool for recording and an apparatus for knowing. This hybridity, of science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, authenticity and performativity, history of imaging and history of knowing is what characterized photography from its very inception.