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Abstract

This study shows that photography, despite its use in the colonial conquests of the second half of the nineteenth century, came to empower actors in East Asia and became one of the tactics that allowed them to contest and reverse unequal power structures. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese revolutionary movements envisioned photojournalism as one of the tools that would lead to their plan to transform the Chinese nation from a dynastic empire into a republic. A close reading of press photographs issued in the anarchist illustrated journal Le Monde (1907) and the Revolutionary Alliance-affiliated The True Record (1912-1913), edited and published in the Chinese language in the transcultural contexts of Paris and Shanghai, sheds light on the tactical uses of photography as a mean of resistance in the context of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. Furthermore, by focusing on the images and artefacts developed and used by Sinophone actors including politicians Li Shizeng, Wu Hui, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Jingjiang, and also by the prominent Lingnan artists Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, and Chen Shuren, this dissertation remarks on the relevance of the photographic historian’s choice of sources. If the exclusive consultation of the colonial archive supports and perpetrates the perception of photography as a means of colonial violence, considering different visual archival sources and local uses of the camera uncovers a radically different story.