Trans Asia Photography

11/11/2025

Our latest issue is now published! Guest edited by Sabeena Gadihoke, "Orphan Images" explores this often overlooked element of photography. https://read.dukeupress.edu/trans-asia-photography/issue/14/2

28/11/2024

Thrilled to announce the publication of our newest, special issue: "Photobook", co-edited by Deepali Dewan and Yi Gu.

spring 2024Vol. 14, No. 1 “Photobook”: An Introduction Yi Gu; Deepali Dewan Articles Unfolding Memory in Adil Hasan's When Abba Was Ill Sreerupa Bhattacharya Humanism in China (Zhongguo renben) and Recontextualizations of Chinese Documentary Photography Bernd Spyra; Sanja Hilscher Vengeance Aest...

22/01/2024

The latest issue of TAP is now available on our website (🔗 in bio)!

CONTENTS

Yi Gu, "Introduction"

ARTICLES

Emilie Boone, "A Photo Album's Redrawn Color Line: On Black Freedom in Japan, 1947–1949"

Lisa Trivedi, "(In)visible Subjects: Pranlal Patel's Women at Work in Ahmedabad, India, 1937"

Shaowen Zhang, "Mending Memory by Hand and Brush: Socialist China's Colored Photographs"

Jennifer Yang, "Haunted Images: Unsettling History and Traumatic Memory in Tintin Wulia's Artmaking"

INTERVIEW

Dorothee Xiaolong Hou, "Framing China's Uneven Urban Landscape: An Interview with Chen Ronghui"

REVIEW

Yi Gu, "Xianshi de tanqiu: Taiwan sheyingshi xinggoukao [Reclaiming Reality: On the Historical Formation of Taiwanese Photography]"

03/10/2023

(T)o make her Balika Mela portraits, Gauri Gill participated in a local Mela for girls in the rural Rajasthani community she had spent a decade documenting, creating a simple photo studio and encouraging the girls (few of whom had opportunities to photographed) to set up their own shots, bring props, and invent their own poses. She also later offered photography classes to the girls and one even went on to become a photographer with a studio of her own. (Maya Kóvskaya, PhD)

Gauri Gill's Balika Mela images are all posed portraits. In Rama, a young woman in a white salwar-kameez sits on a folding metal chair, one hand extended tentatively towards a decorative flower pot stand. She looks straight at us, but we cannot see her eyes: she is wearing sunglasses. In Goga and Mahendra, two younger girls hold hands in what seems like a simple gesture of friendship, but also display their mehndi-ed palms. Sunita, Nirmala and Sita stand in a row, each holding up a hand arranged in a mudra of what might be blessing. Lichhma and Lali wear near-identical black leather jackets over their kameezes; one of them holds a black suitcase, as if in readiness for departure.

The images were created in 2003 and 2010, during fairs organised by the Urmul Setu Sansthan. The 2003 Balika Mela was attended by about 1,500 adolescent girls from a hundred odd villages spread across Lunkaransar, Chhattargarh, Churu, Nagaur and Ganganagar districts of Rajasthan. The girls, Gill writes, were between 12 and 20, "ranging from class five to class ten pass — mostly unmarried, and from a broad swathe of communities, castes and denominations — Jat, Meghwal, Gosai, Mali, Bavri, Rajput, Swami, Kumar, Brahmin, Nai, Nayak, Sansi, Bhatt, Suthar, Muslim". Asked to "do something with photography" at the mela, Gill set up a photo stall in a tent, where anyone could come in and have their portrait taken. The photographs, she says, were "co-directed by me and those in the picture, as well as everyone around us".

In their willingness and enthusiasm to pose — with new friends and old, unexpected gestures, against a painted floral backdrop or seated on a motorcycle — they seem to want to enter the space of fantasy that photography enables.

And yet, they never laugh or even smile — their faces have been steadied into seriousness. In the stiffness with which they hold themselves, in their deliberate banishment of the 'candid', they seem closer to the "expressionless" Bhatisuda villagers than the pleasurable theatrical possibilities of the studio.

Gill's decision to label the photos with the girls' names seems, in this context, an attempt to call into being their individual selves, however tentative. It is also a conscious response, one imagines, to a long history of photography in which the camera captured either the richest or the poor. The rich had names; the poor could be, at most, representatives of social types: a bhishti, a sannyasi, a Toda, a dancing girl.

It must also be a conscious choice to not mark these girls as Jat or Meghwal or Sansi or Muslim. And yet getting away from these identities is not so easy. When Gill dedicates her book to "Urma and Halima, two girls who belong to the nomadic Jogi community" which "may almost be said to exist outside society as we know it", she is pulling those identities into the service of another kind of representativeness. And when she describes Urma and Halima as "looking at the camera with poise and confidence," the image that comes to her is "not unlike the Maharanis of a hundred years ago". (Trisha Gupta, The Sunday Guardian 23rd Sept. 2012)
http://www.gaurigill.com/

08/09/2023

In our latest themed issue on IMAGES AT WAR, artist Sim Chi Yin () reflects on her multidisciplinary project, "One Day We’ll Understand." Her contribution for TAP discusses how she uses photography and modes of archiving to complicate the historiography of the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960, an anticolonial war waged between British colonial forces and the Malayan Communist Party. Sim considers how her work generates a different kind of remembrance and knowing against the gaps and specters of the colonial archive.

Read the portfolio here: https://bit.ly/3OxskJM

Remnants #11, from One Day We'll Understand (2017). Archival pigment print, 110.5 × 110.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of Sim Chi Yin.

14/08/2023

How do we remedy the absence of Indian soldiers who fought on behalf of the British imperial army during World War II in photo albums and military archives? Artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew () reflects on the unevenness of this absencing across different castes, religions, and jobs through three installations titled The UNREMEMBERED: Indian Soldiers of World War II.

Read the portfolio here: https://bit.ly/3OwxR31

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, The UNREMEMBERED: Stories of the Indian Soldiers of World War (2021), installation view. Still image by Steve Zydlowsky.

09/08/2023

What might photographs taken by British military photographers in Hong Kong at the end of WWII tell us about Asian women’s everyday practices of liberatory struggle? In "Hong Kong in Transition: Photography and Liberation at the End of the Pacific War," Nadine Attewell tends to this question through a critical practice of looking and listening to an archive of photos housed at the Imperial War Museum in London that records the transition of Hong Kong from Japanese back to British colonial rule. She asks: “How might our liberation dreams change if we were to center, not the desire for different (former) sovereigns, but the work necessary to sustain people in their lives as more than ancillary to freedom struggles, as, indeed, theories and practices of freedom in themselves?” This article can be found in our latest special issue on IMAGES AT WAR. https://bit.ly/3O8BOJV

Liberation of Hong Kong, ca. August–September 1945. Photographer unknown. Nitrate. Admiralty Official Collection, A 30545, Imperial War Museum.

Duke University Press

31/07/2023

In our latest issue on the special theme of IMAGES AT WAR, Michelle Chase explores the vital role photography played in constructing transpacific solidarity between Cuba and Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Chase's article “Picturing Solidarity,” examines two Cuban solidarity campaigns centered around the imprisoned revolutionary Võ Thị Thắng and “martyr” Nguyễn Văn Trỗi to understand how Cuba interpreted photographs from Vietnam to further domestic agendas – especially about “acceptable forms of revolutionary violence and its gendered expressions.”

Read the article here: bit.ly/3OtFOG7

“[To] Live Like Him: III Anniversary of the Assassination of Nguyen Van Troi, October 15/1967.” A 1967 poster by unknown artist in homage of Nguyễn Văn Trỗi published by the Cuban Committee of Solidarity with South Vietnam.

Duke University Press

27/07/2023

In our latest special issue on IMAGES AT WAR, Santasil Mallik offers a fascinating account of militarism. In "GI Photos of Calcutta: Toward a Vernacular Understanding of War," Mallik
examines American war photographer Clyde Waddell’s album of American GIs and their everyday activities in Calcutta during WWII. This article reveals how Waddell’s photographs facilitate a vernacular language of seeing war that decodes official frameworks for representing war as solely combat on the battlefield. Mallik reads the ethnographic, touristic, and diaristic elements of Waddell’s photographs – soldiers engaging with street vendors, military trucks against mosques – to understand shifts in the global balance of power between a declining British Empire and ascendant U.S. global hegemony.

Read the article here: bit.ly/46VkkcJ

Photo by Clyde Waddell of Sikh boys selling “precious stones” to American GIs in Calcutta, 1945. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

26/07/2023

We are pleased to share a new CFP for our May 2025 issue (15:1).

Orphaned Images: Found or Inherited

Guest edited by Sabeena Gadihoke

This call focuses on the image whose origins are uncertain and history unknown. Photographs have usually been linked to the idea of the evidentiary. Even as the digital turn opens up possibilities of endless transmutation of the image, the `photograph’ still retains its evidentiary status in official documents or in the everyday practice of `making memories.’ The idea of photographic evidence grounds the subject, whatever it may be, to a world that exists and can be known. But how do we understand the photograph that has floated away from its context and come unmoored from its history? Or a photograph that carries traces of partial or incomplete histories or has tenuous links to original circumstances of production and circulation. How have `finders’, ‘discoverers’ or inheritors of such images, engaged with them? How does the orphaned and found image tell its story?

For more information or a PDF of the complete CFP, please visit our website: transasiaphotography.org/submit

Deadline: November 30, 2023

25/07/2023

New call for papers! Writers please consider submitting to a new special issue on “Orphaned Images: Found or Inherited.”