Presentation Schedule
Photography as Continuation or Challenge: Colonial Visuality in Late Qing Dynasty Imagery (89535)
Session Chair: Cedric van Eenoo
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Friday, 16 May 2025 13:15
Session: Session 3
Room: Live-Stream Room 3
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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This article explores whether photography perpetuates or challenges the visual traditions of painting. Drawing on Orientalism, arguing that both photography and painting were employed by colonizers as "tools" to record the cultures of the colonized while simultaneously reflecting the colonizers' fantasies about them. Although photography is often regarded as a more objective medium than painting through its indexicality and evidentiary quality, its selective framing of space and time through the subject reveals its limitations and underscores its similarities with painting. The article analyzes the differences between photography and painting through the lens of medium specificity and photographic theory, and it discusses their impact on the representation of reality within the framework of Orientalism when presenting colonial images. By examining paintings and photographs created by Westerners in China during the late 19th century, the article gets the point that while photography offers the extent of authenticity, its challenge to visual traditions does not entirely disrupt the subjectivity inherent in painting. From some angles, photography continues the visual traditions of painting, establishing a relationship of complementarity and competition. The article concludes by applying Baudrillard'sBaudrillard's theory of photography, which suggests that photography is a form of "spontaneous writing" that reveals the disappearance of reality by reversing the roles of ''subject'' and ''object.'' In doing so, the article raises a question about photography: Challenging the traditional subject-object relationship in representation, and can content thereby approach a more immediate authenticity in the anthropological process?
Authors:
Weili Xi, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
Mr Weili Xi is a University Postgraduate Student at University College London in China
See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule
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