Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China

A history of China’s transition from empire to modern nation, told through photographs by and of Chinese Catholic communities.

Time Exposures explores how historical photographs created by and of Chinese Catholic communities illuminate the vicissitudes of China’s transition from empire to modern nation. Relying on an expansive worldwide network of Catholic photographic archives, this book examines largely unseen and unpublished images related to Catholicism in China. These images, made from the 1870s through the 1990s, were central to visual practices and afterlives that represent, recover, and reenvision diverse Chinese experiences. This volume provides insight into the lives of women and men behind and in front of the camera who were important documentarians of China’s local and national changes over time, shaping ways of seeing and belonging to the country’s many cultural evolutions.