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Abstract

My dissertation examines how amateur photography emerged and developed in China from 1900 to 1937, and how the photographic societies, exhibitions and publications opened new avenues of photographic expression after six decades of problematic colonial photography. Through the examination of a lot of private photographs by the amateur photographers in the Republican period, I argue that photography, once a luxury hobby of the elites in the late nineteenth century was transformed into a new communicative and expressive medium for new intellectuals and bourgeoisie in Republican China. This rise of amateur photography in China and the new photographic vocabulary developed by the photographic societies, exhibitions, and publications from the 1900s to the 1930s indeed contributed to the particular aspects and eventual growth of Chinese visual modernity which is a comprised, complex conception of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century China.