The intertwined evolution of photography and Shanghai

Photography and Shanghai completed each other. With this evocative statement, curator Gu Zheng sets the tone for “Shanghai, Capital of Photography,” an exhibition that traces the intertwined evolution of photography and the city it has both documented and defined over the past 100 years.

Featuring 268 works by 35 photographers and over 80 related artifacts, the show at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum unfolds like a visual history book — one that captures not just faces and streets, but shifting aesthetics, social currents, and the spirit of a metropolis in perpetual motion.

Organized into four thematic sections — Pioneers of Light, Stance of Documentary, Pluralistic Expressions, and Special Presentations, the exhibition invites viewers on a journey through Shanghai’s transformation from treaty port to cosmopolitan hub. Whether it’s the quiet intimacy of studio portraits, the gritty poetry of street scenes, or the avant-garde energy of modernist experiments, each image holds a fragment of the city’s story, frozen in silver halide or digital code.

From the moment Shanghai opened its port in 1843, foreign technologies and aesthetics poured into the city — photography among them. But rather than being a passive recipient, Shanghai quickly became an active participant in shaping the medium’s role in modern life.

“More than any other city, Shanghai has offered both the subject matter and the momentum for photography to keep evolving,” Gu said.

The section Pioneers of Light brings this process into sharp relief, especially in the early days devoted to figures like Ding Song (1891-1969), Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Zhuang Xueben (1909-1984) and many others.

A photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, Ding used his camera to document art students sketching en plein air, women riding motorcycles, and scenes of theatrical flair — all through a lens that blurred the line between realism and stylization. His photos served not just as records but as reference materials for his paintings, and even as playful visual experiments. Through his work, photography became both a tool for modern self-representation and a spark for Shanghai’s visual imagination.

Equally compelling is the work of Lang, widely regarded as a father of Chinese pictorial photography. Lang pioneered a technique he called “composite photography,” layering negatives in the darkroom to create images that mimicked the structure and brushwork of traditional Chinese ink painting. One such image — cloud-wrapped peaks and misty valleys rendered in grayscale — feels less like a photograph than a dreamscape from an ancient scroll.

His collaboration with renowned painter Wu Hufan (1894-1968), who turned one of Lang’s photographs into a detailed landscape painting, underscored how photography in Shanghai didn’t just borrow from traditional aesthetics; it actively dialogued with them. In Lang’s hands, the camera became a bridge between old and new, East and West, image and idea.

As Shanghai's skyline continued to rise and its streets grew ever more crowded, a new generation of photographers turned their lenses toward the everyday — the overlooked, the ordinary, the quietly transformative.

In contrast to the painterly compositions and idealized aesthetics of early pioneers, the works in the section Stance of Documentary reveal photography’s growing power to bear witness. Here, the camera is no longer just a mirror — it is a microscope, a reporter, a conscience.

They capture the rhythm of real life: the riverbanks where families picnicked, the chaos of stock exchanges in the reform era, the vanishing corners of working-class neighborhoods. It’s an archive of not just what Shanghai looked like, but what it felt like to live through its many reinventions.

Lu Yuanmin’s lens has always leaned toward the margins. He is best known for his Suzhou Creek series — a long-term photographic project that captures life along one of Shanghai’s most historically loaded waterways. Taken over several decades, the images map not only the physical contours of the creek but also the emotional and social rhythms of those who live along it.

In Lu’s frames, women squat to rinse vegetables in metal basins; shirtless men smoke by the water, their bicycles propped nearby; children chase a ball that teeters dangerously close to the edge. Laundry flutters like flags of ordinary life, and brick walls wear the stains of time.

His work doesn’t shout; it listens. With Suzhou Creek as both subject and metaphor, he transforms documentary photography into a form of quiet archeology — excavating the everyday to show how the city truly lives.

Yong He’s photographs cut straight into the feverish heart of Shanghai’s early 1990s, when stock trading moved beyond brokerage halls and spilled into parks, plazas, and even sidewalks.

His one well-known image — men jostling for a spot at a Shenyin & Wanguo brokerage, eyes burning with urgency — could almost be mistaken for a film still.

Xu Haifeng’s works crackle with tension. His lens captures Shanghai at full speed in the 1990s — a city electrified by neon lights and the promise of reinvention.

But nowhere is his sense of timing more striking than in The First Blast on the Huangpu River, a panoramic photograph taken at the moment of a dramatic demolition along the riverfront. A dense cloud of smoke rises like a phantom from the collapsing buildings, signaling not just the end of an industrial era, but the beginning of luxury housing and manicured greenbelts.

This image, with its massive scale and cinematic framing, feels almost unreal — yet it is pure documentary. Xu positions his camera to make viewers feel the blast in their chest. It is photography not just as a witness, but as a warning: a city reshaping itself, one explosion at a time. Through Xu’s work, Shanghai’s transformation is rendered not as smooth progress, but as rupture — sudden, loud, irreversible.

As Shanghai entered the 21st century, photography expanded beyond documentation into expression. In Pluralistic Expressions, the camera becomes a tool not only to record what is real, but to imagine what could be. This section features artists who blur the lines between photography, painting, performance, and design — testing the boundaries of the medium, and in turn, of the city itself. Whether through conceptual staging, darkroom manipulation, or digital collage, their works explore identity, memory, and the architecture of dreams within Shanghai’s ever-shifting urban landscape.

Artists like Zhang Enli, Luo Yongjin, Niu Youyu, and the collective Birdhead each explore the possibilities of photographic collage, layering time, space, and cultural memory in strikingly different ways. Born in Shanghai and now internationally active, Liao Yijun (Pixy Liao) brings a sharp and playful perspective to questions of female agency, identity, and intimacy, subtly echoing the complexities of Shanghai womanhood. Meanwhile, Hu Weiyi revisits classical darkroom techniques, reanimating analog processes with contemporary intent. Here, photography becomes not just a way of seeing, but a way of thinking.

The Special Presentations section includes a display of vintage cameras, reminding us that Shanghai’s status as a "capital of photography" is not only artistic, but also industrial.

With support from the Shanghai Old Camera Museum, the exhibition showcases several models of the iconic Seagull cameras, first produced in 1958.

Alongside these are artifacts from earlier eras, including richly designed photography magazines and photo books from Republican-era Shanghai. These publications, elegantly printed, visually sophisticated, speak to a city that embraced modernity through image.

If you go:

Date: Through May 5

Hours: 10am-6pm (Closed on Mondays)

Venue: Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

Address: 5-6/F, 48 Weihai Road

Ticket: 60 yuan (US$8.2)