ABSTRACT
This chapter considers images submitted to their subjects’ unprecedented interrogations of visual existence. Probably photography’s largest category of production attracted restless concerns mortality, physical change, gender, and the popular effect of duplicating the self in the same image. Individuals often claimed to suspect that their appearance in an image was a separate existence, and scrutinized it with a rhetoric that exaggerated this wariness. The chapter looks at the rising interest in both the material environment and forms of work as the objects of a new scopic erudition. Tongsheng photographers created content that turned the commercial into the sublime, co-opting nature’s harsh beauty, Chinese history and patriotic symbolism for a new aesthetic insistence upon economic development. Lastly, the chapter surveys visual interest in the environment, the variously nearby, remote, small or vast latency from which photography’s outdoor objects provided content recalibrated to a form sufficient to join its discussion to that of photographs’ material composition.
