Papers by William Schaefer
October Magazine, 2017
In his body of photographs, Samalada (2008), Adou uses extremely expired film; the resulting arti... more In his body of photographs, Samalada (2008), Adou uses extremely expired film; the resulting artifacts––marks of the animal, vegetable, and mineral matter composing film surfaces––are as visible a part of the photographs as their depictions of relations among humans, animals, plants, cultural artifacts, earth and sky in southwestern China. Adou and other photographers in China, Japan, and the West working in a time of environmental crisis understand film itself, Schaefer argues, in ecological terms. The very materiality and forms of photographic images are emergent from or interact with larger ecosystems of matter, bodies, spaces, surfaces, and markings, atmosphere, liquids, pollution, and light, and thereby allow the human to be seen as one among many contingent agents within ecological processes. Photography thus becomes a crucial site for staging and rethinking fundamental questions of the relations between culture and nature––and for learning to picture the Anthropocene.
Representations, 2010
Observing a conjunction between massive rural-to-urban migration and the recent documentary turn ... more Observing a conjunction between massive rural-to-urban migration and the recent documentary turn in Chinese art, this essay suggests some of the ways documentary photography works as a medium of historical thinking in contemporary China. Through the work of the photographer Zhang Xinmin, it examines the cultural politics of blankness and marked surfaces as representational strategies for exploring the intersection of historical remains and mass migration.
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 2003
Books by William Schaefer
Duke University Press, 2017
Shortlisted for Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize (2017)
Reviewed in CAA.reviews; C... more Shortlisted for Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize (2017)
Reviewed in CAA.reviews; Critique d'art; Cross-currents; History of Photography; Journal of Asian Studies
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. Analyzing 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.
More information: https://www.dukeupress.edu/shadow-modernism
Edited volumes and texts by William Schaefer
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 2010
Book reviews by William Schaefer
The Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1, 2002
Trans-Asia Photography Review, 2016
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Papers by William Schaefer
Books by William Schaefer
Reviewed in CAA.reviews; Critique d'art; Cross-currents; History of Photography; Journal of Asian Studies
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. Analyzing 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.
More information: https://www.dukeupress.edu/shadow-modernism
Edited volumes and texts by William Schaefer
Book reviews by William Schaefer
Reviewed in CAA.reviews; Critique d'art; Cross-currents; History of Photography; Journal of Asian Studies
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. Analyzing 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.
More information: https://www.dukeupress.edu/shadow-modernism