The title of Chang Shih-Lun's 2021 monograph on Taiwan photography, Xianshi de tanqiu: Taiwan sheyingshi xinggou kao (Reclaiming Reality: On the Historical Formation of Taiwanese Photography), carefully brackets the term history.1 This book arrives at a crucial juncture when renewed momentum and interest in Taiwanese photography over the past decade have led to an increase in writings, exhibitions, and even institutions focused on Taiwan's photographic heritage. As Chang astutely observes, the history of Taiwanese photography is currently undergoing rapid canonization. However, the lack of archives or collections, and their subsequent reemergence, continues to challenge conventional accounts. This unique state of liminality between “stability” and “mutability” enables Chang to not only explore the construction of photography as a medium in Taiwan but also dissect the very act of history writing itself. The result is a profoundly stimulating and groundbreaking work on photography that combines decolonizing and de-imperializing efforts with the demystification of the nation-state as a sole anchor for photographic histories.
This substantial volume comprises a preface, sixteen chapters, and a conclusion, providing an overview of the development of photography in Taiwan from its earliest usage to the contemporary moment. The first chapter serves as an introduction, situating Taiwanese photography within the current debates on the limits and promises of archives and their relation to decolonization. The subsequent chapters are loosely organized in chronological order and, as the author explains in the preface, can be read independently. Chapter 2 problematizes the commonly accepted “origin story” of photography in Taiwan, while chapters 3 to 7 examine Taiwanese photography during the Japanese colonial rule through case studies on photobooks, postcards, landscape photography, local customs, folklores, and wartime mobilization. These chapters explicitly confront the challenges of reconstructing history through a colonial archive, exposing the establishment of an exotic imaginary of Taiwan through the oppressive homogenization and layered colonial subjugation of indigenous communities by both Han settlers and Japanese colonizers.
Chapters 8 and 9 address the question of what the “postwar” of Taiwan photography is. They outline the emergence of new infrastructures such as photographic associations as well as Cold War institutions such as the United State Information Service, under which photographic production and dissemination was operated. Chapters 10 to 12 delve into the influence of modernism, a pivotal concern within Taiwan's cultural landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, situating photography within the turn to xiangtu (the native) and the humanistic values promoted by the magazine Renjian. The final four chapters cover the half-century following martial law until the contemporary moment, examining the discursive formation of “documentary photography” in Taiwan and its diverse practices, the often-overlooked genre of “essay photography,” the rise of “photography installation,” and the participatory creation of photography exemplified in the Sunflower Movement. The conclusion contemplates how contemporary art has influenced photography in the past two decades, cautioning against photography's sense of inferiority and the attempts to conform to the criteria or ecology of contemporary art. The book concludes poetically, affirming not only the potential of the photographic medium but also the writing of its history, which Chang believes holds a unique potential for reflectivity.
This potential is achieved in this volume through a staunch resistance to an empiricism-driven history that severs past and present or suppresses the subjectivity of the narrator. To take chapter 2 as an example, Chang juxtaposes Scottish photographer John Thomson's photographs of Taiwan—which are often hailed as the beginning of photography in Taiwan, given Thomson's auteur status—with three other groups of photographs of Taiwan taken around the same period. Rather than proposing a new origin story, Chang highlights the impossibility of such a pursuit and the historiographic impulse that yearns for a definitive starting point. The author gracefully weaves together facts, observations, and contemplation, combining historical inquiry with critical theories and engagement with Thomson's photos by contemporary Taiwanese artists, many of whom grapple with the oppression of the Indigenous communities by Han settlers in Taiwan. While the book upholds academic rigor, its stylistic defiance of conventional academic prose reflects the origins of many chapters as articles initially published in venues like the Taiwan-based photography journal Voices of Photography, which is not a part of the index-controlled global academic publication industry but consistently showcases top-quality scholarly and artistic work to both professional and general audiences.
Chang demonstrates a deep understanding of contemporary theories on photography, archives, and decolonization, citing and engaging with luminaries such as Édouard Glissant, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariella Azoulay, among others. However, as the author explicitly states in the preface, the case of Taiwan is not merely a local illustration of the universal applicability of theories originating in the West. Without much fanfare, this volume proposes a unique approach to reconsidering the essence of photography. While Chang's interpretation of photography and its meanings throughout the book undoubtedly bears the influence of Allan Sekula and John Tagg, there is an equal resonance with Taiwan-based artists and writers, such as Kao Chung-Li, who insist on an essence of lens-based media despite acknowledging its historical contingencies. To Chang, this essence of the photographic medium is neither its entanglement with death, loss, or ephemerality, nor its supposed indexicality. His insistence on returning to the question of what photography truly is avoids fetishizing the unique expressiveness of the medium, instead viewing photography as a generative concept for reevaluating the relationship between subject and object, between memory and history. In other words, Chang's fascination with the ontology of the photographic medium is inherently epistemological: photography is a form of thinking that inevitably leads to introspection about the medium itself. Similarly, any photo history that concerns itself with the photographic medium necessarily intertwines historical investigation with the ongoing process of history making, including the continual renewal of archives.
While reading this exceptionally rich and nuanced book, I, as a scholar based in North America and teaching in English, couldn't help but think that it should be translated. I pondered what would be necessary to facilitate understanding for readers who may have little knowledge of Taiwan's history. However, by the end, I realized that the brilliance of the book and the potential challenges in translation might not be easily disentangled. Chang writes about historical materials from the concerns and standpoint of contemporary Taiwan, a society situated between two competing empires—China and the United States—with a past burdened by layers of colonial trauma. His incisive critique of nostalgia for colonial modernity, questioning of mythmaking by empires and nation-states, and rejection of a unifying grand narrative that suppresses nuanced local perspectives all actively engage with contemporary debates in Taiwan on how to construct a past and envision a future. Chang's book provincializes the Western-centric history of photography, and it commendably goes far beyond a shout from the peripheral to the center. This book reflects on the history writing of Taiwanese photography from Taiwan and for Taiwan. Deeply rooted in local context, it nevertheless offers much to learn for anyone interested in photography, photo history, and their potential in ever-generative critical knowledge making.
Note
The literal translation of the title could be “An exploration of the form and structure of a history of Taiwan photography,” or “An exploration of the form and structure of a Taiwan history of photography”.
