Sensing Light: Knowing through Photography in Modern China

Abstract

“Sensing Light: Knowing through Photography in Modern China” examines photography’s transcultural history as an epistemic medium—how it reshaped the boundaries of knowledge and ways of knowing. Turning from photographs as visual images to photography as a process that renders the previously invisible visible and sensible, the dissertation shows how practitioners in China—including spiritualists, amateurs, soldiers, and designers—adapted photography for diverse purposes, from spiritual cultivation and vernacular entrepreneurship to military reconnaissance and design innovation. These endeavors of using photography as a tool of knowledge and of transmitting its technical expertise constitute an epistemic modernity that undergirded aesthetic reform, industrial modernization, and technologized warfare in modern China. At the center of these epistemic negotiations is light, at once photography’s symbolic and operative element. In early twentieth-century China, “light” was undergoing dramatic change: its nature was redefined by electromagnetic theory; its experience transformed by new lighting technologies; and its symbolic force became tied to knowledge, progress, and modernity. What was the light, or lights, that photography actually grappled with? By returning to this elemental question, the dissertation maps a spectrum of sites where photographic image-making was never purely visual or reprographic, but involved the production of sensitivity across vision and more-than-visual sensory practices, human and more-than-human ways of sensing, as well as life forms, environments, and technologies. To write this light-sensitive history of photography, the dissertation draws on photographic manuals from multiple East Asian and Euro-American languages. It treats manuals both as historical evidence and as a methodological model for rethinking the nature of photographic knowledge through mechanical parts, technical know-how, and transcultural networks. By mobilizing manuals as method, the project foregrounds a long-overlooked dimension of China’s visual modernity: scientific, technical, and processual images beyond photography’s canonical uses in art, documentary, and entertainment. It also develops modes of reading that restore photographs to photography, shifting from seeing images and objects in them to sensing the often-invisible material-discursive conditions of their emergence. While the dissertation focuses on the first three decades of the twentieth century, its stakes extend into the present. In an era of ubiquitous image-making and computational visual culture, when AI-generated imagery unsettles conventional definitions of photorealism, reality, and humanity, this project offers a manual drawn from the lost possibilities of photography’s early history—a manual for working with mechanical apparatuses and redistributing creative agency across human and nonhuman actors.